I have anticipated the fact that the sum total of your baggage will consist of a suit case, because personally conducting a trunk through Holland would be just as incongruous as saddling a Shetland pony with an elephant howdah. There are two methods of seeing the Island of Walcheren, equally fascinating, and the visitor can avail himself of both in one and the same day. The first is by climbing the two hundred and seventy-odd steps to the top of “Long John” in Middelburg, and the second by a drive around the Island, covering, perhaps, thirty miles, and touching the three principal places of interest: Veere, Domburg, and Westkapelle. To state here that the Island of Walcheren is not an island might seem a bit ambiguous, but it is true, nevertheless, and may be explained away as follows: Long before our time, perhaps in the distant Paleozoic age, Walcheren was nothing more than shallow water. Along came the Dutch--who have a happy faculty of making their own geography as they need it--and, seeing prospects in its development, built a sort of cofferdam around it, pumped the place dry, and made it into an island. It made a fairly good island, and in later years they grafted it on to the parent land by a long embankment across an arm of the Scheldt, and made it into a peninsula. A peninsula it still remains, but its future is all a matter of conjecture. “Long John,” or _Lang Jan_, if the sobriquet be translated into Dutch, is practically the Washington Monument of Walcheren. It is the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in Middelburg, capped with a climax of forty-one bells that chime a quaint fragment of some familiar popular melody every seven-and-a-half minutes. On the hour Long John literally vibrates from foundation to weather vane in a frenzied endeavor to pour forth _in toto_ the accumulation of more or less music administered in small doses during the previous sixty minutes. It is up the middle of Long John you must climb in a spiral to obtain a first impression of Walcheren. It is a tedious task, and by the time you are halfway up you are blessing the memory of the man who twined the now much worn hand rope along the steep staircase. You may even be about to give up in disgust, when, of a sudden, you stumble in upon the lofty hermitage of old Hendrick Landman, the keeper of the bells.