Another feature was the glaring heat of the place--the day of my visit being a rather humid one in July; and still another--the most important of all--was a quiet, shady nook on the low portico of a little café just back of the Groote Kerk, from which sheltered position I looked up more than once over the tops of the trees and admired the lofty steeple of the old house of worship through the bottom of a tall, slender glass. But a short ride from Bergen-op-Zoom brings you to Rosendaal, which, from the apparent activity about the station, might be by long odds the most important town in all Holland. It is the seat of the Dutch customhouse and therefore the junction of many railway lines, north, south, east, and west; or _vice versa_. All roads lead in the Netherlands, not to Rome, but to Rosendaal. To explore the town is scarcely worth the trouble, but the railway station itself deserves especial notice. If you enter Holland from the Belgian frontier it will be impossible not to notice it, for the train will stop long enough at Rosendaal for the customs officials to question each and every passenger personally about cigars, perfumery, and other dutiable articles. If you come from the east or the west it is eleven chances to one you will have to change cars at Rosendaal, in which latter predicament you will at least enjoy a stroll up and down the long station platform. This Rosendaal station struck me as being about the cleanest, shiniest place, for a railway station, at which I had ever changed cars. Not a speck of soot or dust was visible to the naked eye, and it is possible that one of old Zacharias Jansen’s microscopes wouldn’t be able to find any either, although a certain few, larger and more grotesque than their fellows, might be brought to notice under the lens of an instrument of later model. Every doorway was guarded by a pair of little boxwood or bay tree sentries, and flowers filled the boxes under the windows. The leather tables and chairs in the waiting-rooms and restaurant all but suggested a Spanish Renaissance influence, and their great brass-topped tacks glittered as if they had never known what it was to be tainted with stain or smirch--and this in a railway station.