The Hague is at once the most beautiful and the most expensive city in Holland. It is the Paris, the Washington, the Berlin of the Netherlands all in one. Like Paris, it is so overflowing with history and art that it would take a small book to tell of it all in detail; like Washington, it is beautiful, and the official residence of the chief executive of the nation and the diplomatic corps, but not half so expensive; like Berlin, again it is just as beautiful and twice as expensive. It is the magnetic pole of the American tourist in Holland, and it takes pains to cater in many ways to his whims and fancies, not to mention his pocketbook, and thus hold his patronage. Half the town speaks English and most of the remaining half understands it. Its people are obliging and courteous and seem to take a personal interest in making your stay one of pleasure and instruction as they do in no other city in Europe. In The Hague I have tried to explain to an obtuse conductor, in smatterings of German, Dutch, and English, where I wished to get off the car, and half a dozen fellow-passengers, finding a stranger in difficulty, have chimed in without the least solicitation and untangled my knots of pantomime with real Dutch verbiage. [Illustration: Snapshots here and there. The Dutch maiden is a miniature of her mother, and she is taught cleanliness and thrift from the time she begins to learn the meaning of words] But, being the tourist center that it is, it has naturally developed the old familiar nuisance to be found in all cities of its ilk in Europe: the piratical parasite who stands in ambush behind the hotel porter as you start out in the morning and tags along halfway to your destination, shouting an incessant “Do you vont a guite, sir? Do you vont a guite?” You will find him in almost every part of the town, but his particular lair is in the lee of the picture galleries. Either by instinct or by abnormal powers of observation he knows that the average tourist whose time is limited will make a bee line for the nearest picture gallery before he has even had an opportunity to unpack his grip. So here near the galleries the guide awaits the coming of his prey. If you succumb to his prattle, all is lost, save the hope that he may soon run out of things to show you. But an excellent entertainment for a party of, say, four or five is to club together and hire a guide, let him take you whither he will, and, during the process, keep him under a rapid fire of questions so foolish and insipid that it will tax his ingenuity even to answer them incorrectly--as, you may remember, Mark Twain and his friend overwhelmed their guide in Genoa. This is the only way to obtain value received with--more often, without--respect to the guide, for his sense of humor is proverbially null and void and affords a vulnerable target.