They sang and danced very prettily, as housewives, as fisher girls, but particularly as Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes.
In the music halls both at Amsterdam and Rotterdam I listened to comic singers inexorably endowed with too many songs apiece; but I saw also some of those amazing feats of acrobatic skill and exhibitions of clean strength which alone should cause people to encourage these places of entertainment, where the standard of excellence in such displays is now so high.

I did not go to the theatre in Holland.

My Dutch was too elementary for that.

My predecessor Ireland, however, did so, and saw an amusing piece of literalness introduced into _Hamlet_.

In the impassioned scene, he tells us, between the prince and his mother, "when the hero starts at the imagined appearance of his father, his wig, by means of a concealed spring, jumped from 'the seat of his distracted brain,' and left poor Hamlet as bare as a Dutch willow in winter." The Oude Kerk has very beautiful bells, but Amsterdam is no place in which to hear such sweet sounds.