Soon a great black hull appeared far down the river. Darkness was gathering fast, but they knew the lines of that ship as they knew their little gardens at home. They un-reticuled their handkerchiefs and waved and giggled and giggled and waved. For full twenty minutes they waved and giggled, and then they held the kiddy up. The ship turned off to enter a dock on the opposite side of the stream and, as she turned her port beam to us, someone--it would not have been difficult to guess whom--on her bridge held up a navigator’s three-foot telescope, it having been doubtless already very much in hand, and waved a brief but significant, “All’s well; see you in two hours”--or waves to that effect. Yes, there is still romance in shipping, and Rotterdam, being first, last, and all the time a shipping town, there is romance in Rotterdam. The most satisfactory way of approaching Rotterdam is by water, and the most satisfactory water way is from Dortrecht. By this route you obtain not only the most characteristic views of Rotterdam and the bustle and business about her water front, but you get also the glimpse of Dortrecht that Albert Cuyp availed himself of so often, for the water front of Dortrecht doesn’t seem to have changed much, according to Cuyp, except in the item of steam for sail. It is a pleasant trip of an hour and a half duration down the Maas, past numerous shipyards that are capable of building anything from a canal boat to an ocean-going cargo carrier; past great suction dredges assigned to the perennial duty of keeping the river conquered; past fishers for salmon, who, by treaty, may lower their nets only upon certain days in order to give the German fishers, higher up the stream, an equal opportunity to make a living; past little hamlets whose river docks and picturesque dock tenders serve in lieu of railway stations and the more prosaic red-capped and frock-coated station masters. But Rotterdam, by reason of her trade, does not coincide with the general idea of Holland. She is more or less cosmopolitan, to be sure, but this phase strikes the traveler less forcibly than her ardent activity. What with her electric cranes and machine shops and sugar refineries and tobacco factories and shipbuilding yards and distilleries, she gives one the impression of a thriving German seaport. The home port claimed by the greater number of the seven hundred or more steam and sailing vessels that make up the merchant marine of Holland, is Rotterdam, and through this port passes at least one-half the country’s total imports by sea and almost as much of her exports, together with four-fifths of Holland’s trade with the Rhine. But Baltimore, in the matter of population, would make two of this, the most active, the most important seaport of the Netherlands.