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primitiveness of all this region. Even the rude stares that met me and my southern garb in the streets, were more pleasing than annoying. Strangers rarely come into the region merely to look about them; and so little is there even of local travel, that the small silver coin I had taken the evening before, was looked doubtfully upon by the gingerbread dealers of Deventer. In every other portion of Europe I had been harassed by falling in with French and English, in every coach and at every inn. Here I was free from all but natives; and not a single post carriage had I fallen in with over all the country from Bremen to Deventer. There was a spice of old habits in every action. There was a seeming of being translated a century or two back in life; and neither in coaches, nor horses, nor taverns, nor hostesses, was there any thing to break the seeming. The eggs at the inn were served in old style; the teapot, low and sprawling, was puffing out of a long, crooked nose, by the fire, in good old fashion; the maid wore a queer old cap and stomacher, and she and the cook peeped through the halfopened door, and giggled at the strange language we were talking.

The daughters of the market-women were many of them as fresh and rosy as their red cabbages; and there were daughters of gentlewomen, looking as innocent as the morning air, out of the open casements:—in short, I was half sorry I had booked for Arnheim; and what was worse, that the coach was at the door of the Crown.

I should have grown very sulky in the coach, had it not been for the exceedingly beautiful scenery we were going through. The fields were as green as English fields, and the hedges as trim and blooming as English hedges. The cottages were buried in flowers and vines, and an avenue embowered us all the way. A village we passed through was the loveliest gem of a village that could bless an old or a young lady's eyes in Europe. The road was as even and hard as a table, and winding. Hedges were each side of it, and palings here and there as neatly painted as the interiors at home; and over them, amid a wilderness of roses and jessamines, the white faces of pleasant-looking Dutch cottages; -the road throughout the village as tidy as if it had been swept, and the trees so luxuriant that they bent over to the coach-top. Here, again, I would have wished to stop-to stop, by all that is charming in bright eyes-for half a lifetime.

An old Dutch lady, a worthy burgomaster's wife of Arnheim, would not leave off pointing to me the beauties as they came up, with her fort joli and charmant; to all of which I was far more willing in accordance than of the two-thirds of the coach seat, which was surely never intended for such sized bodies as that of the burgomaster's wife. I was sorry, notwithstanding, when we had finished our ride in the clean streets of Arnheim, and set off, in a hard rain, by the first train for Amsterdam. All the way down, through Naarden and Utrecht, the rain was pouring so hard that I had only glimpses of water and windmills. I bade my friend of the office in the Amstel good-by, and though he promised to call at my inn, I never saw him again.

I did not much like the little back room on the first floor which they gave me at the Oude Doelen, for it seemed I could almost put the end of my umbrella into the canal; and there was a queer craft, with a long bowsprit, lying close by, that, for aught I knew, with a change of tide, might be tangling her jibboom in my sheets. I ventured to say to my host that the room might be damp.

"Le diable !" said my host; and without making further reply to my suggestion, turned round and spoke very briskly with the head-waiter. What he said I do not know; but when he had finished, the waiter clasped his hands, looked very intently at me, and exclaimed with the utmost fervour,-" Mon Dieu !"

I saw I had committed, however innocently, some very grave mistake; so I thought to recommend myself to their charities by taking the room at once, and saying no more about the dampness.

When I woke up, the sun was reflected off the water in the canal into my eyes. From the time I had left Florence, four months before, I had not received a letter from home, and my first object was to seek out a Mr. Van Bercheem, to whom I was duly accredited. God-sends, in verity, are letters from home, to one wandering alone; and never did a wine lover break the green seal off the Hermitage as eagerly as I broke open the broad red wax, and lay back in the heavy, Dutch chair, and read, and thought, and dreamed-dreamed that Europe was gone -utterly vanished; and a country where the rocks are rough, and the hills high, and the brooks all brawlers, came suddenly around me,where I walked between homely fences, but under glorious old trees, and opened gateways that creaked; and trod pathways that were not shaven, but tangled and wild; and said to my dog, as he leaped in his crazy joy half to my head, "Good fellow, Carlo !"-and took this little hand, and kissed that other soft cheek- -heigho! dreaming, surely; and I all the while in the little back parlour of the Oude Doelen at Amsterdam!

A rosy young woman came out into the shop that I entered with the valet, upon one of the dirty canals, and led me into a back hall, and up a dark stairway, and rapped at a door, and Mr. Van Bercheem appeared. He was a spare, thin-faced man of forty,—a bachelor,-wedded to business. At first, he saw in me a new connection in trade; it was hard to disappoint him, and I half encouraged the idea; but my present travel, I assured him, was wholly for observation.

Ah, he had tried it, but it would not do. He was lost,—withering up, soul and body, when he was away from his counting-room. He had tried the country,-he had tried society for a change, but he could find no peace of mind away from his books.

He spoke of the great names upon 'Change,-the Van Diepens, the Van Huyems, the De Heems; and I fancied there had been hours when he had listened to himself, adding to the roll,-Van Bercheem.

The valet put his head in at the door to ask if I wished him longer; I dismissed him, and the merchant thanked me.

"These fellows are devils, monsieur; he has been keeping his place there at the door to know what business you and I can have together, and he will tattle it in the town; and there are men who disgrace the profession of a merchant, who will pay such dogs;"-and he lowered his voice, and stepped lightly to the door, and opened it again; but I was glad the valet had gone.

He asked me in with him to breakfast; it was only across the back hall, in a little parlour, heavily curtained, and clean as Dutch parlours are always. The breakfast was served,-I knew not by whom,-perhaps the rosy woman in the shop below. A cat that walked in, and lay down on the rug, was the only creature I saw, save my friend, the merchant. I tried to lead him to talk of the wonders, and of the society of

Amsterdam; but his mind worked back insensibly to 'Change and trade. He finished his breakfast, and went back with me to the counting-room. He gave me a list of his correspondences;-he put in my hands a great packet of cards of houses from Smyrna to Calcutta, and of each he gave me a brief history, with the never-failing close, that each was safe and honourable. He pressed upon me thirtyfive cards of the house of Van Bercheem;-he wished me success;he hoped I would not be forgetful of him, and sent a little Dutch boy in the office to show me the palace. He went back pale to his books. I shall never forget him.

In an hour, with the Dutch boy, I was on the top of the tower of the palace. The view that lay under my eye that July day, and one not wholly dissimilar, seen three months before from the tower of San Marco, at Venice, are the most strange that met my eye in Europe.

Here, as at Venice, there was a world of water, and the land lay flat, and the waves played up to the edges, as if they would cover it over. At Venice, the waters were bright, and green, and moving. At Amsterdam, they lay still and black in the city, and only where the wind ruffled them in the distance did they show a sparkle of white. The houses, too, seemed tottering on their uneasy foundations, as the palaces of Venice and the tower of the Greek church had seemed to sway.

But the greatest difference between the two was in the stir of life. Beneath me, in the Dutch capital, was the Palace Square and the Exchange, thronging with thousands, and cars and omnibusses rattling among them. Along the broad canals, the boatmen were tugging their clumsy craft, piled high with the merchandise of every land. Every avenue was crowded, every quay cumbered with bales, and you could trace the boats along the canals bearing off in every direction; even India ships were gliding along upon artificial water above the meadows where men were reaping; and the broad, high dykes, stretching like sinews between land and water, were studded thick with mills, turning unceasingly their broad arms, and multiplying in the distance to mere revolving specks upon the horizon.

Venice seemed asleep. The waves, indeed, broke with a light murmur against the palace of the Doge, and at the foot of the tower, but the boats lay rocking lazily on the surface of the water, or the graceful gondolas glided noiselessly. The Greek sailors slept on the decks of their quaint feluccas; no roll of cart, or horses' heavy tread, echoed over the Piazza di San Marco; a single man-of-war lay with her awning spread at the foot of the Grand Canal. There was an occasional footfall on the pavement below us; there was the dash of the green seawater over the marble steps; there was the rustling of the pigeons' wings, as they swooped in easy circles around us, and then bore down to their resting-places among the golden turrets of St. Mark; every thing beside was quiet!

The little Dutch boy and I went down the steps together. I thanked him, and asked him my way into the Jews' quarter of the town. He would not permit me to go alone. He had learned French at his school, where, he said, all the boys of merchants spoke it only; and a great many intelligent inquiries he made of me, about that part of the world which could not be seen from the top of the palace tower: for further, poor soul, he had never been. The tribe of Israel cannot be clean even in Dutch-land; and though their street was broad, and the houses rich,

there was more filth in it than in all the rest of Amsterdam together. There they pile old clothes, and they polish diamonds by the thousand.

Walking along under the trees upon the quays beside the canals, one sees in little, square mirrors, that seem to be set outside the windows of the houses for the very purpose, the faces of the prettiest of the Dutch girls. Old women, fat and spectacled, are not so busy with their knitting but they can look into them at times, and see all down the street, without ever being observed. It is one of the old Dutch customs, and while Dutch women are gossips, or Dutch girls are pretty, it will probably never go by. In Rotterdam, at Leyden, at Utrecht, and the Hague, these same slanting mirrors will stare you in the face.

Nowhere are girls' faces prettier than in Holland; complexions pearly white, with just enough of red in them to give a healthy bloom, and their hands are as fair, soft, and tapering, as their eyes are full of mirth, witchery, and fire.

I went through the street of the merchant princes of Amsterdam. A broad canal sweeps through the centre, full of every sort of craft, and the dairy-women land their milk from their barges, on the quay in front of the proudest doors. The houses and half of the canal are shaded with deep-leaved lindens, and the carriages rattle under them, with the tall houses one side, and the waters the other.

My boy-guide left me at the steps of the Royal Gallery. There is in it a picture of twenty-five of the old city guard, with faces so beerloving and real, that one sidles up to it, with his hat hanging low, as if he were afraid to look so many in the face at once. And opposite are some noble fellows of Rembrandt's painting, going out to shoot; they jostle along, or look you in the face, as carelessly as if they cared not one fig for you, or the Dutch burgomaster's family, who were with me looking on that morning; and there was a painted candle-light and bear-hunt,-how a tempest of memory scuds over them all, here in my quiet chamber, that I can no more control than the wind that is blowing the last leaves away!

Would to heaven I were gifted with some Aladdin touch, to set before you actual-only so many quaint things and curious, as lie together in the old Dutch capital; churches, and pictures, and quays, and dykes, and spreading water,-sluggish and dead within, but raging like a horse that is goaded without!

Like a toad the city sits, squat upon the marshes; and her people push out the waters, and pile up the earth against them, and sit down quietly to smoke. Ships come home from India and ride at anchor before their doors,-coming in from the sea through paths they have opened in the sand, and unlading their goods on quays that quiver on the bogs. Amsterdam is not the most pleasant place in the world, when a June sun is shining hot upon the dead water of its canals, and their green surface is only disturbed by the sluggish barges, or the slops of the tidy house-maids. I grew tired of its windmills and clumsy drawbridges, and tired of waiting for Cameron. I left him a note at the Oude Doelen, telling him that we would talk over matters some day-Heaven grant that the day some time come !---upon the green banks of wild Loch Oich.

VOL. XXIII.

H H

SCENES FROM THE LAST FRENCH REVOLUTION.*

BY THE FLANEUR IN PARIS.

WITH A PORTRAIT OF M. GUIZOT.

THE events of that rapid and sweeping revolution, which in a few hours overthrew a monarchy in France, and established a republic, are too well known to need any repetition. But, although all these matters be now "familiar things" in men's mouths, yet a few vague sketches of the physiognomy, as well moral as external, of the French capital during that week of convulsion, when the first act of a great drama of history was acted, may not be unacceptable, perhaps, from the pen of one who has already made Paris and the Parisians his study, and who was a spectator of many of the stirring scenes enacted.

As early as Monday, the day previous to the supposed meeting of the Opposition banquet, the first impression of the quiet resident in Paris, on leaving his house, was to ask, "What great holiday, or what great fête is it to-day? What is the meaning of all these people in the streets?"- for the streets were thronged, not with a rabble-mob, but with the usual citizen-like promenaders of Sundays and holidays. No one could tell. But everybody expected something, although nobody as yet knew what and everybody who could leave his business to come abroad, and many who could not, had come forth" a sight-seeing," although there was no sight to see but themselves. It was known that the public demonstration of the Opposition, fixed for the morrow, had been utterly forbidden by the government, that eighty thousand troops of different arms were collected in and about the capital: people then went home disappointed, and said that all was over. Disappointed! All over?— Nothing was yet begun; and Paris slept tranquilly that night.

Yes! Paris slept in quiet, and allowed the morning of the Tuesday-the day fixed for the demonstration that was not to take place, said almost every one,-to dawn, in the hope that, since the Opposition had given up their banquet, and such an overwhelming force of troops was collected to overawe the tumultuous, and check any disposition to riot, another émeute in Paris would have been strangled in its birth. At a little before noon on Tuesday those who dwelt in the neighbourhood of the Place Louis XV., and consequently of the Chamber of Deputies, might be aware that there was now really "something," that a storm was rising; for, in their quiet apartments they began to hear a distant noise, that came by "fitful gusts" along the air. By degrees, however, the roar became distinctly the roar of men; and even articulate cries might be heard.

As the Flâneur proposes now principally to sketch such scenes as passed before his own personal observation, he trusts he will be forgiven for the apparent egotism of personal narrative, as he now plunges all at once into extracts from his daily journal.

"When I turned out' I found my street in a state of uproar and

The above account reached the Editor so late in the month, that he is compelled to avail himself of such portions only as appeared more particularly interesting to the public.

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