Of all Zeeland, the particular costume of that province can be observed to the best advantage on the island of Walcheren. A milkmaid of Middelburg, for example, is a joy to look upon. Her spotless white cap bristles at the temples with _kurkenkrullen_ like the antennæ of a prehistoric beetle. Her skirts are ankle-high and padded generously at the hips. If she be naturally rotund and the skirts need no padding, circumstantial evidence of the fact is sufficient to stamp her the belle of the community. The sleeves of her bodice are very short and very tight, pinching the arms above the elbows so that they might be mistaken for a pair of aggravated cases of inflammatory rheumatism. Of course the sun in all its glory strikes the backs of these arms, for she always walks with them akimbo, the better to balance the pails which dangle one from each end of a wooden yoke, enameled a vivid robin’s egg blue. But the redder the arms from the rays of the sun and the tighter the pinch of the sleeves, the flatter the chest and the broader the hips, the sooner will she cease to be a mere milkmaid through the medium of a simple marriage ceremony in the village _kerk_. The only discordant note in the otherwise harmonious landscape on the road to Veere may be said to be a flitting one. It assumes the distended shape of a buxom village maiden in the full provincial costume--padded skirts and all--astride a bicycle, spinning townward or homeward over the bricks. For the bicycle, be it known, is the natural--and it has therefore become the national--means of locomotion in Holland. Everybody rides bicycles; and since the only hills are the approaches to the dikes or across the humpbacked span of a canal drawbridge, their invention has been no less a boon to the populace at large than it has been a bane to the sight-seer. In The Hague, for example, they have become a veritable pest, and to be constantly dodging them in the streets keeps a person very much on the jump. By and by you will rattle into Veere. You can tell it is Veere by its church, for Veere’s church is something to remember. It is by far the biggest thing on the island of Walcheren. It is the first building of historical or architectural importance that you will pass on entering the town from Middelburg, and its immensity, so foreign to the Veere of to-day, may be able to convey to you some remote idea of what Veere used to be before the sea leaked in over the cofferdam and blotted out most of the place between suns. [Illustration: This picturesque tower at Westkapelle belonged originally to a fifteenth-century church that was burned in 1831. It is now used as a lighthouse]