Import a treacherous-looking Italian in a vivid pink shirt and let him stir up the aroma by poling his mournful gondola up and down a certain canal in Dortrecht, and you will have a scene in Venice itself. This canal, spanned at intervals by narrow bridges and bordered with three-story houses that hang over it menacingly, is obviously the reason why so much good stout canvas and so many tubes of excellent paint have been used up by Dutch artists in picturing Dortrecht; for a little of Venice, they must have thought, is better than none at all. In view, therefore, of the length, tediousness, and expense of a trip to Venice in those days, many of the best of the Dutch painters stayed home and exercised their talents on that canal in Dortrecht. All of which we may consider a boon to the art of the Netherlands as well as to the picture-loving public. [Illustration: “He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam”] IV ROTTERDAM He who says the romance of the West is dead has never mingled much with the “eight-section man” down in the southwestern corner of Texas. He who avers that the romance of steel is played out and defunct has never straddled an I-beam of a New York skyscraper in the building high above the vortexes of street traffic, above the flirt of a housemaid hanging out clothes on a lower roof. He who claims that the romance of shipping has succumbed under the pressure of modern methods has never been to Rotterdam. They have a pretty park in that San Francisco of Holland that fringes the bank of the Maas. On its river side, near the entrance, there is a café, where, in the evening, the less romantic Rotterdamer basks and imbibes in the throes of a virulent orchestra. Farther along under the trees, past the café and overlooking the river, numerous benches invite the lover of the sea and its ships to sit him down and gaze upon the great steel hulls--and wooden ones, too--that have just returned from, or are about to depart for, a lengthy and uncertain argument with Father Neptune. The view from here is several times more magnetic than it is from the neighborhood of the café, and so here, about dusk, come those wizened warriors upon whom the sea has cast her spell once and for all time, to sit and smoke their pipes upside down and dream, perhaps, of other days, of other ships, of other seas. Three or four may occupy a single bench, but it will be an hour before a word is passed between them. It is their only method of rejuvenation, and they are loath to be reminded that their day is almost done. A certain sort of reverence pervades the place; it would seem a blasphemy even to speak aloud.