My first visit to Holland brought me to Delft from “The Hook” at a very early hour in the morning, when the housemaids were about to commence the first concentrated assault of the day upon their pavements, doorsteps, front doors, and the brass-work pertaining thereto in the shape of knobs and knockers. “Scrub” seemed to be the housemaids’ slogan, and they were certainly living up to it. Pail after pail of water was hoisted from the canals and splashed over everything in reach, until it flowed across the streets and pavements, and fell back whence it came originally. If I had appeared upon the scene a little later I might have concluded that a cloud-burst had struck the town. And all this brackish water, that, in the canals, comes within an ace of being absolutely stagnant, being poured so recklessly over the town, gave to it a kind of antique odor, anything but pleasant to inhale. It gave every evidence that that same water had been hoisted, put to its task, and allowed to drip back into the canals again since medieval times. This was on a week day. A subsequent visit to Delft took me there on Sunday. Now, for some reason, psychological or otherwise, the housemaids of Delft don’t seem to take the same interest in the scrupulousness of their doorsteps on a Sunday that they do on a week day. Sunday is the day that everybody in Delft dons his or her best bib and tucker and goes to church, or leans over the railings of the canal bridges and chats with a friend, or walks about the town under the shade of its trees, contemplating, perhaps, upon the exigencies of life. And a housemaid is but human. [Illustration: The East Gate of Delft, one of the quaintest and quietest cities of the Netherlands] To come upon Delft, therefore, during this weekly interruption in the perennial polishing of the town, whatever the reason for it, offers the traveler a different and vastly more agreeable impression. He will see Delft and her people at their best, the latter more congenially courteous, the former more serenely stolid. Instead of the boatmen being continually in the act of disturbing the bottoms of the canals with their poles, so that the housemaids can skim off the most graveolent of it with which to scour and rinse their pavements, they assume for the day the rôle of flower sellers. Boats bearing fragrant burdens of potted plants of every variety, and cut flowers as well, as if to try to make amends for the mal-odor of the previous week, will be drawn as close to the sidewalks as the banks of the canals permit, in order to tempt the frailty of the Delft housewife--if an inherent love of flowers may be termed as such--on her way home from church.