and by his vociferated asseveration of 'er schtinkt nicht, er schtinkt nicht;' but I found, before I was half way up the Rhine, that my genuine meerschaum perspired unpleasantly and smelt abominably. One or two other things more I have to say about Rotterdam; first, of the cleanliness, which I really believe. in, and which is common, I know, to all Dutch towns. The retail trade in brooms, shovels, dustpans, and pails done in Rotterdam seems enormous. On my way to the pipe-shop I passed down one narrow street -almost a lane-where nearly every other shop was devoted to the sale of besoms. It was as though the outskirts of the village 'Much Birch,' in England had been suddenly denuded of their underwood, and the broomsticks were sufficient to mount a whole legion of witches on their way to the Sabbath on the Blocksburg. I think the small children of the shopkeepers in that narrow street must have slightly ticklish times of it when the demand for birch-brooms is slack. Next, as to the bridges. You know those uncomfortable little pontine arrangements in the Liverpool docks, which suddenly swing away from you as you are about to set foot on them to allow the huge Australian clippers and Yankee emigrant ships to pass, and keep you, sometimes, an hour and a half from your dinner, and staring savagely at unattainable banks of the basin opposite. They manage these things much better in Holland. Barges, and galliots with masts of considerable altitude, are passing up and down the multitudinous canals at every hour in the day, and the name of the bridges is legion. By a very simple and admirably-carried out arrangement, these vessels pass through with the smallest amount of inconvenience to the pedestrian public. The bridges are divided in the middle, and when a tall-masted vessel is at hand the two halves are hoisted by very unornate apparatus of ropes and pullies to a vertical position on either side of the canal. So soon as the vessel has passed, the

halves of the bridge are lowered again to their original position, join, and form a flat surface. A single policeman at either end suffices to work the machinery; but it is curious to see the business-like impatience with which the public at both extremities await the joining of the bridge. When the half, in its descent, is as steep as a Montagne Russe, there are already swarms. of adventurous men and lads scrambling up it; nay, it is at an angle of a good many degrees when cabs and carts are seen to adventure upon its planks. To get over the bridges seems to be the only thing which the Rotterdammers deem worth being in a hurry for. Of the Dutch soldiers, I may say that they are very stout (not so stout as art thou, my friend) and very peaceable-looking, and that the subaltern officers are, for the most part, martyrs to an insane ambition to tighten their girths, so as to produce wasp-waists. As well might an elephant attempt to wear stays! And, lastly, people must not say that Rotterdam is at all like Venice, vulgar or genteel. It is no more like Venice than Venetian red is like Dutch pink. To institute, even in the hundredth degree, a comparison between this butter-firkin and cheese-rack, and tobacco-bale-smelling city of fat canals, with their smug alders, and scrubby pollard willows, and demure poplar-edged banks and Venice, is an insult to the Queen of the Adriatic, the lovely, lamentable, delightful, decayed City of the Waters, marvellous in her misery, beautiful in that slow death, which Byron sang, and Joseph Turner drew."

The slim gentleman is supposed to have drawn up a very elaborate report on Rotterdam, which his companions conjecture to have been at once æsthetic, economic, and ethical. He positively refused, however, to allow any portions of it to become public, saying that he would see the stout gentleman and the M. I. C., his friends and fellow-travellers, barbecued before he would read, or allow it to be read. It is supposed,

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however, that the report contained some disquisitions pregnant with art-knowledge respecting the High Church-a very grim, Calvinistic edifice, of immense size, whitewashed within, having an open wooden roof, and speckled with dark tablets to the stern memory of departed Dutchmen, high church elders, admirals, burgomasters, men cast in a stronger mould than the peaceful traders of the present day; men who were strong in preachments, and counsel, and fighting; in the age when such Dutchmen as William of Orange and John de Witt were heard of, and when Van Tromp swept the seas (O shame for Albion!) with a broom at his mast-head. Vaunting Englishmen, when you brag of the Highlanders in the Louvre, and the Guards in the Champs Elysées, in 'fifteen, remember that Paul Jones has been in the Frith of Forth, and the Dutch in the Medway.

It is also believed that the slim gentleman had some very pertinent things to say regarding the museum of pictures at Rotterdam, which museum is situated in a squabby building of considerable magnitude, containing an excellent collection of Dutch pictures, though not with the exception of a wonderful portrait of a yellow-haired woman, by Rembrandt-of the very highest class. There are some capital Dutch family and "conversation" pieces of the period of our Commonwealth and Restoration-large canvases full of full-lengths of grave, earnest-looking personages, and comely matrons in black velvet and gold chains, and rich-laced ruffs, looking, moreover, like gentlemen and ladies-a look very uncommon among the modern Dutch people. There are some pseudo-Italian pictures, too, which are as execrable as they are ludicrous ; and some indifferent drawings by artists whom I will class under the generic name of "Van Duffer." All these things the slim gentleman was observed to gaze very intently upon; and, during the subsequent travels of the Three, he occasionally condescended to let fall