comfortably installed ever since the day before.
Another piece of good news! So Gudin was here, like Biard and myself, to see the Coronation, and Gudin is not only a friend, but a fellow-craftsman as well. He is at least as much a poet as a painter,—witness his shipwrecked sailor clinging to a single spar with a single star in the sky to guide his course.
We sprang ashore. There was not a minute to lose; the train started at nine o'clock for The Hague, and it was now half-past eight. We hurried across the town with that important, pre-occupied air peculiar to people running after locomotives. We had the same good luck as at Brussels and reached the station in the nick of time.
Three quarters of an hour later we were pushing our way through a scene of wild dissipation,—a kermesse full of noise, dancing, shouting and band-playing, crowded with travelling shows, gaufre sellers' stalls and gherkin purveyors' booths.
The two last, the gherkin dealers and gaufre sellers, deserve a special description, inasmuch as nothing in any way equivalent to these curious institutions is to be found at home.
In Holland people get drunk on gherkins and hard-boiled eggs, and eat gaufres and drink punch to get sober again.
The intending reveller simply halts in front of one of the booths where vegetables in vinegar are for sale, he lays down five sous on the counter, takes a fork in his right hand and a hard-boiled e^g in his left. Then he prods his fork into a great tub in which lumps of cucumber as big as a common gherkin are floating about like real fish.
He pulls out one of these pieces and gulps it down, immediately applying on top of it a hard-boiled egg. This pleasant alternation is continued till the patient's stomach cries hold, enough! Happy they whose gastric capacity is double, triple, quadruple; they have to pay no more than their neighbours. Five sous is the recognised price to everybody.
The physicians of all countries have made scientific and moral observations on the various forms of intoxication,—spirituous intoxication, vinous intoxication, intoxication with beer, intoxication with gin, all have been studied. There is only intoxication with cucumber that has never yet had a systematic report devoted to it.
I will do my best to supply the want. No sooner is a Dutchman drunk on gherkins than he feels an irresistible temptation to indulge in reckless dissipation. Accordingly he marches up- to the gaufre sellers' stalls.
These stalls merit a more detailed description. As a rule four women keep them, two matronly and middle-aged, two young and attractive looking. All four are dressed in Frisian costume.
The latter includes a pleated bodice more or less graceful and a skirt more or less elegant. It is not there the originality of the costume lies, but in a double skull cap of gilt copper, which fits tight to the temples on either side of the head. Two little gold ornaments stick out at either outer extremity of the wearer's eyebrows, like a pair of miniature fire-dogs. On the copper plaques are usually fixed two or three curls of false hair. Atop of all is perched a cap with side pieces of lace.
You would hardly think it, but this strange conglomeration of a copper covering giving the head the appearance of a gilt skull, hair growing on the copper and lace mitigating the too brilliant reflections of such parts as it covers, forms a very agreeable looking tout ensemble.
The two dames of a certain age sit, one in a chair by the door, the other behind the counter, where they seem permanent fixtures. The lady at the door sells gaufres, while the other at the counter serves out punch.
Meantime the two girls flit about and devote themselves to the task of attracting customers. They recognise at a glance any cucumber consumer who has taken too much and beckon him to come in. If this is not enough, they dart out and lay hands upon him.
Once inside the booth, which is provided with private rooms at the rear for the benefit of customers of a retiring disposition, a plateful of gaufres and a small bowl of punch are set before the strayed reveller. One of the girls attends to his wants, and in a quarter of an hour or so the man leaves the place as sober as a judge. Such was the process we saw again and again repeated that evening of May 10th, just four and twenty hours after quitting Paris.
We had covered, thanks to the numerous turns and twists of the Scheldt, no
