less than a hundred and sixty leagues during the said twenty four hours. Whereupon, finding our beds already prepared for us by the forethought of our friend Jacquand, we turned in to the accompaniment of the most infernal din of discordant musical instruments I have ever heard in my life.
CHAPTER III
MERMAIDS AND SIRENS
MEMORY, kind gift of God whereby men live again in their past lives, magic mirror that lends the objects it reflects the vague poetry of twilight, the soft outlines of distance, with me thy presence is especially vivid, thy attraction irresistible! I take up my pen fully and firmly resolved to take a bird's eye survey, with never a thought of stopping between start and finish. But lo! all along the way memory has set up landmarks to draw my attention, and I find myself, in spite of myself, soul and body, a bondsman to the past. My mind that was for skimming the intervening space as swift as the lightning, hovers uncertainly, like the soap bubble borne upon the breeze, which iridescent with sapphire, ruby and opal hues, reflects on its ephemeral sphere houses, fields and sky,—an eternal world on the surface of a world to perish in another moment.
So it was in the present instance; I had planned to devote one short chapter to our journey,—reaching the French frontier, crossing Belgium, descending the Scheldt, reaching Amsterdam, and embarking for Monnikendam, where I was to find Père Olifus. But you see how on the way I have been detained, one after the other, by Biard, the King of the Belgians, the man with the bass viol, the windmills of Dordrecht, the ships at Ysselmonde, Jacobson's letter, Jacquand, the kermesse at The Hague, the gherkin dealers and gaufre sellers, the pretty Frisians with their gold head-dresses. You see how I have stopped repeatedly at every object, animate and inanimate by the way side; how I have again and again pointed my finger, turned my head aside, and halted; how at the opening of my third chapter I am only at The Hague on the eve of the Coronation, and shall want all the rest of this chapter for what I have to say of the King and Queen, Amsterdam with its three hundred canals, its thirty thousand flags, its two hundred thousand inhabitants. My readers must just forgive me; God has made me so; and they must take me as I am, or else shut the book once for all.
All the same I have good hopes of getting to Monnikendam by the end of the chapter. But there, man proposes, we all know, and God disposes. Anyway, like the paper boats children launch on a brook, which for them is a river, I am going to let myself drift down the current of my narrative, at the risk of capsizing to-day and not reaching my destination till to-morrow.
I had a letter from King Jérôme Napoleon for his niece the Queen of Holland, which on my arrival I had at once forwarded to its address. The result was I found myself awakened next morning by the arrival of a special messenger from the Palace. I poked my head out of the feather bed in which I lay buried and asked why they had called me so early.
His Majesty's aide-de-camp had, it seems, brought me on behalf of his Royal Master a permit to join, myself and my companions, the special train, and was to send me later tickets for the diplomatic stand from which to view the Coronation ceremony.
The special train was to leave at eleven o'clock, and it was now nine; so I thanked the messenger and tried to extract myself from my bed. I say "tried to extract myself," and that is the best way to put it; indeed it is no easy thing to escape from a Dutch bed, shaped as it is like a box and furnished with two mattresses stuffed with feathers, in which you sink bodily and which close over you.
It is really beyond belief the variety existing with regard to the accessories and shape of a piece of household furniture which in every country of the world has the same end in view, viz., to rest the human body. Stay-at-home folks may suppose that everywhere people must of course go to bed in the same fashion, or pretty nearly so; but they are mightily mistaken. Place side by side an English bed, an Italian bed, a Spanish bed, a German bed and a Dutch bed, submit
