As you enter Rotterdam or Amsterdam on the railway you pass row after row of what we please to call tenement houses. Even these are not devoid of a cozy, homelike aspect that our tenements and even reasonably inexpensive apartment houses know not. Each apartment can boast of a balcony in the rear that is partitioned off from its neighbors. In many cases these balconies are shaded with awnings from the glare of the sun and decorated with flowerpots in profusion. This serves the city dweller in lieu of a garden, and here he eats his meals and spends his evenings after work. In the daytime the family use the balcony as an improvised sewing room. Many of the back yards of the smaller houses consist of a tree lined canal over which the family looks from the seclusion of a flower girdled, awning covered veranda. The Dutch not only keep themselves cozy but they take a tender sort of interest in the well-being of their birds and dumb animals. True, they train their dogs to help their masters pull the milk carts or vegetable wagons, but the dogs look husky and well fed and seem to take pride in their accomplishment. A spare-ribbed stray canine prowling around the neighborhood is an unknown quantity in Holland. In the center of some of Rotterdam’s canals which are barred to traffic and made, instead, to assist in the beautification of the city, you will see little wicker duck nests, like empty market baskets turned on their sides. They rest on piles driven into the bottom of the canal, and the entrance to each is approached from the water by means of a wooden incline about the size of a shingle. This is not only a convenience for the ducks but features as an artistic break in the monotony, I might say, of the canal. And these are but a few of the reasons why a visit to Rotterdam, although barren of the types and characteristics that Holland is noted for, is well worth the trouble; if only to study the city and its inhabitants from a psychological point of view it is well worth while. V DELFT AND HER TRAGEDY Nineteen minutes in the train from Rotterdam, and you are in Delft--such are the distances between towns in South Holland. The population of Delft amounts, numerically, to some 32,000, but this is an item that is farthest from your thoughts. It is one of the quietest, quaintest cities in the Netherlands. Up and down its narrow, lime shaded canals the boatmen of Delft pole their barges laboriously, yet noiselessly, walking along the decks from stem to stern against their padded means of propulsion and literally pushing their craft out from under them. In the spring these watery highways are covered with a fragrant layer of fallen blossoms; in the fall, with leaves of variegated colors. The houses that stand behind the trees have been well built and are well preserved, adding to the place an impression of comfortable solidity.