A Hans Brinker Boyhood

I

THERE must be a beginning to things remembered. At first there were things too hazy, too indefinite, too sharpened or blurred by things which followed, to be reliable and trustworthy. But over the first definite impressions the old town looms still indelibly. Anyone who has at any time lived there, even for a few days, knows that the old place can, even must, do this. For that, reason this will likely be about a very old Dutch town stamping its impression upon boyhood memories, rather than about a childhood lived in an old gray village.

I think I was four, not much older. It was a windy day, without color, in late autumn; I had been swathed in mufflers, and I wore heavy woolen socks and a pair of new wooden shoes — glossy black shoes, adorned with little gilded buds and leaves. I can’t remember the shoes, but they must have been like that. Inevitably, Sunday wooden shoes were black. Everyday shoes were unpainted. We were going to visit relatives, more definitely to see a grandfather who was dying. Unpainted shoes would never have done.

If I can’t recall the way I was dressed, I do remember on that day the dike, the gray sea on one side, and on the other side, much deeper below us, the fields from which the harvest was gone, weighted down by a heavy, shifting sky. Before this time I had lived in a small inland village where I had been born, only a few miles away from the old town toward which I trudged bravely, holding my mother’s hand. After some walking, weary walking for me on new hard unpliable shoes, we had reached the dike and had climbed its high, steep flight of red-bricked steps. From there on we walked along the dike, on top of it, a blustering wind pushing us along. Sometimes Mother carried me, especially later when I became afraid. It was that fear, the memory of it, that has remained with me till this day.

The sea was dull, gray-green, and sent up its vast sad monody over which gulls and terns shrieked shrilly. Far away, and almost palpably lonely, lay the two North Sea islands of Ameland and Schiermonnikoog. Above us gray and black crows scolded and quarreled, descended to pick up mussels and clams, ascended again, very high in the sky, to drop their finds on the hard slate-black basalt stones at the base of the dike in order to crack the shells. Between those basalt stones weasels stretched long, vicious necks. On the other side of the dike lay the land. But the land brought no alleviation. The fields were brown and without vegetation. The sky was full of scudding blackness. Hundreds of canals and ditches reflected more algidly the gloomy firmament above them. Everywhere the villages lay dead still, clusters of red roofs around a gray tower. Sometimes on a far-off road moved a single man or a horse, making the loneliness more terrible. Years later that same loneliness would strike me on late autumn days, as I walked along the same dike, and in retrospect it still looms like something closest akin to melancholy and anguish.

A few weeks later the whole family and all our household goods were on a canal boat. We were moving, going back to the old town where Grandfather had died, where both Father and Mother had been born, and their parents and forbears, for generations and generations. This time the going was not so lonely. The sun came out that day, and Father was there, and my brothers. Besides, twice the highly loaded boat got stuck beneath the bridges over the canal, and people stopped along the shores and watched our slow progress. We moved into an old house with a huge fireplace tiled all around with glazed blue tiles that depicted Bible stories. There was an old gray tomcat that went with the house. While we lived there our new house was being built, a bright red brick one, but surmounted by a bluetiled roof, instead of a red one, the only roof of its color in the town.

But the old town and its eternal sea were not yet done with giving their worst possible impressions. There were storms, and the sea roared tremendously above us and through the wade chimney, or howled in sudden lapses of wind. There came a night when no one slept, and voices sounded shrill and gull-like outside, above the wind. From time to time someone would tap on the windowpane to announce in a gruff, weathered voice how high the sea stood behind the dike. Wooden shoes clattered outside. Sometimes Father went out and Mother looked anxious. Bells tolled perpetually and foghorns sounded, though there was no fog. Before midnight we were carried out of the house, each one of us in turn on Father’s arm, each one worrying about the old gray unperturbed cat, though Father was already wading waist deep through water before he deposited us in the old church which stood on the only mound for miles around.

Fortunately ebbtide came soon, and most of the dike held. But the next morning my brother and I walked with Father along the battered dike, and saw the remnants of a street which had been swept entirely into the canal, and even stood and watched men lift the body of a woman from the canal, her long hair full of broken shells and silt, and her eyes wide open and bleached. Also, there was a strange, very large fish on top of the dike, and, where the old cemetery had been, skulls and skeletons lay clean and washed in regimental order.

But the village and the sea had shown their worst. After that came much that is unforgettable, almost as much that is beautiful and peaceful, and certainly no little that is colorful.

II

The name of the old town is Wierum. It is still there, no doubt as secluded and self-contained as ever, hugging a shallow bend of the long dike, its old church and tower almost on top of the dike, where once they had stood well inland. The sea had come one day, far back in gray history, and the inevitable had happened. On the sea side of the dike where crabs crept and jellyfish floated, beneath silt and sediment, are old cobblestone streets and older foundations. A few miles away the sea laps its regular tides where once a large city stood. Tourists seldom come — especially not Americans. The railway does not touch it. It is in the province of Friesland, once a separate kingdom, perhaps the most untouched section of the Netherlands as far as tourists are concerned.

Yet, Wierum is old, very old, perhaps the oldest town in Holland. It has the oldest standing tower, a gray bulky affair, with walls almost as thick as the interior is wide. In the north wall of the church is a very low door, bricked in now, so that only the outline remains, like an old healed wound. That door was built there by the Norsemen during their invasions. The Frisians, Christianized by that time, refused to bow to Norse gods. Hence some ingenious Norseman conceived the idea of putting very low doors in the north side of the church, so that worshipers would have to bow deeply toward the north when they left the church after worship, as all other entrances were blocked. But, were the Norsemen ingenious, the Frisians were shrewd. After church service they did leave by the low door, but they backed out.

The town is full of historical reminders. Excavations were always carried on, and we grew used to strange unearthed pots and stranger images. Old houses still stood where missionaries from England had lived when the town was pagan. Five miles away Saint Boniface was murdered, the first date on our history charts, marked in red for the blood that had flowed. But the date was taken as a matter of pride, never grieved over in our town, in spite of our Christianity. There were many other things, but all this historical atmosphere did not matter to us. We took it for granted. Everything was deeply rooted in the past — how else could it be?

Childlike, we accepted and seldom wondered, though we could not help dreaming, and playing our own fantastic games with sticks and stones and mounds, bows and arrows, sometimes as Norsemen, sometimes even as Napoleon, who was really very modern. It was not till I had lived in the United States for some time that I realized something had been lost; something which might be very important and without substitute for growth — perhaps not. Still, I am happy to have had it and lived it.

The old town had shown an extremely hostile face at first. Perhaps strangeness can be little but hostility when one is four. Soon that was almost forgotten, however, for there was beauty, real beauty, and calm and age. In spring when the dike was white and pink with millions of small daisies, and the sheep along the dike restive because the young yellow lambs were too frisky, and the sky was blue and the canals blue reflections of sky laid between deep green fields, and the huge clouds traveled importantly all day, and the sea’s voice was like a huge contented purring cat over the red roofs, and birds, children, old men, dogs, cats, and cows were everywhere, there was little that could surpass it.

Nor was life gray and monotonous. Never. Even as children, stolid as Dutch children are rumored to be, we had our perpetual round of excitements. Even on wooden shoes, for that is all we ever wore or could wear on our feet, except in skating time, or a few weeks in July and August when we might dare to try low leather ones. And wooden shoes are comfortable; I never considered them otherwise. Leather ones seemed like feathers and too light for reality. Many and varied were the uses and benefits of wooden shoes. The canals and ditches overflowed when rains came, and after thaws. The mud on the roads was at least ankle deep, narrow strips between hundreds of puddles. Leather shoes were impossible. Furthermore, no Dutch boy fights with fists or hands. The approved way of fighting is with wooden shoes, resulting in battered and bloody heads, and at least one thoroughly soaked foot, as long as the wooden shoe belonging to it is used in fighting. Girls fight in the same way.

Wet feet never mattered. If we came home during rainy seasons with our feet dry, Mother imagined there was something wrong with us, that we had not been where every normal Dutch child should be, in water, mud, and slush, and the result would be a close questioning about pains anywhere, and for good measure we’d be fed a worm cookie and a tablespoonful of cod-liver oil before we were tucked in.

Also, wooden shoes made delectable clattering noises on pavements, they were admirable for sliding on ice, and even better as sailboats in the canals and ditches, with an improvised mast and sail, held to the inside bottom by a piece of putty, something each boy was provided with in his ample pockets. Besides, wooden shoes fit in nobly with the terrific Dutch cleanliness. In a country where streets, stoops, and outside walls are scrubbed almost weekly, and the inside of houses are given a good turn twice daily, it is expedient to wear footwear which can be kicked off in one second even before one steps on the scoured stoop. To determine if one’s friends were at home, and how many of them, and how large and small, one needed only to look at the row of wooden shoes in front of the door. In school each one had his numbered cubbyhole for his shoes, as we sat in the schoolrooms simply in our socks.

But even wooden shoes are taken for granted, in spite of their use as weapons and toys. Even with them we might have had a goodly dose of monotony. Still, of monotony there was none. My boyhood was a series of varied delights. Even when I chose to play alone, there were always the tides, the winds, and water and mud to make it easy. I sually all the village children played together, always subject to a possible interference brought on by periodic civil wars between the children of fishermen and those of land workers. For all games there were ‘modes,’ and no one dared to go contrary to the approved and current mode. There was nothing forced about these modes or fashions, however. They sprung up naturally, sometimes induced by the weather, but never forced upon one by a dominant group or a bully. On Tuesday one might be playing with hoops, and nothing but hoops. But when Wednesday dawned, with perhaps one or two more clouds in the sky, somehow the mode for hoops was ended, and balls or tops or kites — whatever the mode called for — would be in evidence everywhere, even though no one had made mention of any change on the previous day. It just happened, and everybody conformed willingly and spontaneously. There was no force or tyranny. Individuality exerted here would have seemed as foolish as changing Tuesday to Saturday.

III

The modes and games were endlessly varied, a vast succession of them throughout the year, never duplicated. Some of them were dangerous and the despair of parents. One of the worst was the ditch-jumping mode, during which every child set out for the country, — with jumping poles or without, depending upon the mode, — to jump ditches. Total immersions would be frequent, and drownings sometimes occurred, though usually prevented by the fact that both boys and girls traveled in large groups. This mode came invariably in autumn when the fields were bare, the farmers contented and not worried that their crops would be trampled, while the ditches and canals would be filled to the brim, making the mode as adventurous and dangerous as possible.

In spite of their frequency, these submersions always remained special events. No sooner had the unlucky victim been pulled out of the water by his friends than the whole group of friends would suddenly turn against him. There was no pity left for him. While he ran home to deliver his wet self to his mother and punishment, all the other boys would follow him, keeping close at his heels, singing tauntingly in unison: ‘Een snoek, een snoek. Een kikkert in zijn broek’ — which, verbally set over, means: ‘A pike, a pike. A frog in his pants.’ Other children joined en route, so that long before the town was reached the cries had been heard, and anxious mothers would be waiting in doorways, expecting the worst, ready to snatch the drenched one — in case it was hers — from the group, to tug him inside by his wrist. The rest would be mystery. And still, in spite of the jeerings of everyone, the boy who throughout a year had ondergezeten (‘sat under the water’) more often than others was acclaimed as something of a hero, even though none would ever intentionally go out of his way to achieve the honor.

Stilt walking also was a mode to cause gray hairs for mothers. Selfmade, wobbly, terrifically high stilts were the fashion. From them one clattered disastrously downward on heavy wooden shoes, either into deep mud or perhaps with broken bones upon the pavement. If cleanliness is next to godliness, the knikker or marble mode must have been a machination of the devil. Mothers suffered silently. In no other mode did the weather play so great a part. For successful marble weather, it must have rained for days, the roads must be impassable on account of ruts and puddles, the mud must ooze at least a foot deep. Those were the perfect days for marbles. To comprehend the disapproval of mothers, one must understand that the game, as played by Dutch boys, calls for one knee on the ground, the right fist well buried in the mud, aiming at marbles several yards away, likely wholly invisible. After a few hours’ play, coats and shirts and faces were plastered with mud, and wooden shoes were often irrevocably lost. But all parents bowed to the modes. All except the minister, whose immaculate children watched us through windows with languishing eyes.

We had school, of course, and plenty of it. Two long sessions a day, of four hours each, with one hour off at noon, and only two weeks’ vacation during the whole year, barring skating days. But we knew of no easier way. Compared with American standards, our schooling was hard. In the first place we were Frisian, and did not speak a word of Dutch when we started school at the age of four. Frisian is etymologically, perhaps, the language closest akin to Old English. Even to-day it frequently bears closer resemblance to English than to Dutch. But we had to learn Dutch, and patiently and without protest we did, as soon as possible, for when we reached the fifth or sixth grade we had to start on other languages — German, French, or English. That too was taken for granted, for, as Hollanders, our teachers told us we were predestined to roam over the earth, to know of all foreign countries and all foreign ways.

The study of geography was intensive, that of mathematics even more so, so that in the sixth and seventh years one had had his sound fundamentals of geometry and algebra. There were other important subjects, and the ones stressed especially in my town dealt with tides, stars, moon, and winds, things of immediate and intense interest to children whose fathers sailed the seas. Wierum was preëminently a fishing town. Hence the ever-abiding interest in all the vagaries of the elements. Hence also — and most unfortunately for me, as it was my lot to be taken to America by my parents when I was thirteen — English was not taught in the schools of the town.

Once Wierum had been flourishing, but the English had come across the North Sea with larger and speedier vessels, backed by vast commercial interests, and had year after year snatched away the fish within the very sight of shore, where the fishermen of Wierum always fished. Poverty and ruin resulted; protests were of no avail. But the English were never forgiven, and the teaching of English in the schools was forbidden. The very few times the question came up, it was voted down overwhelmingly. And so it happened that I came to the United States at thirteen without being able to speak a word of English.

IV

Perhaps the high tide for unalloyed enjoyment came to the town during skating time. Not only our town, but nearly all of Friesland participated. Winters there are long, but not severe. Furthermore, the water in the canals is salt and brackish, and the ice is slow to form. But as soon as the weather forecast indicates frost of any severity, all shipping in the canals stops, and for a reason very likely different from any other in the world: a ship pushing through the new ly formed ice would inevitably spoil any intended skating, a sin which would be unpardonable.

Long before the ice was strong enough, dogs and even reckless boys were coaxed out on it to test it. As soon as the ice would bear a man, no matter how it groaned and bent, the very adventurous souls would be on hand with skates. If the frost continued, everybody would be on the ice the next day, schools and workshops would close, and stores would open only for an hour or two in the morning. The whole populace flocked to the canals with skates.

To be unable to skate in Friesland is a disgrace. At four one has to learn. With small skates tied to one’s shoes — always leather shoes for skating — and a little chair in front of one to push off on, one is left with other initiates on a small canal set off for that purpose, no parents or brothers to guide him. And each child learns willingly and as fast as he can, in order to join every living soul of the town on the big canals. A holiday spirit pervades everything. For once housecleaning is neglected and forgotten. Mothers are on the ice, and grandmothers, when not too frail and old. No one works. And in the afternoon whole families — single file, father ahead, mother next behind him, hooking her hand into his which he holds on his back, then each child according to age, not sex — set out together for distant parts, zooming and swaying along with the utmost gusto and speed.

Those afternoons one calls on relatives miles away. Every town is connected by the network of canals, and men are paid to keep the snow off. Only cripples are on land, and they partake of the holiday festivities by setting up booths and stands beside the canal, where they sell drinks, cookies, and chocolate. On the canal one meets other groups, family groups, large and small, all swooping past in perfect rhythm, no one out of stroke. One visits relatives for the first time during the year — rather, one meets them on the ice, for no one wants to sit inside. Ice days are perfect days. Good will reigns. Dutch skates are built for speed and distance; there is little chance for skating on rinks, and, were it possible, no one would be found to skate on them. And Dutch skates are wooden skates; but, contrary to popular conception, only the upper part is made of wood, to support and hold the steel blades.

The people of Friesland are still the skaters of Holland, and all the Dutch skate on Frisian skates. Besides, as far as skating is concerned, the Frisians are still as unconverted as in the days when they massacred Saint Boniface and his band. Once a head schoolmaster, imported from the South of Holland, tried to enforce national school laws by refusing to give excuses for skating. The parents ignored him, and in spite of his raging no one turned up at school, not even the other teachers; and when he came fuming and military-haughty to the canal he was jeered and laughed at. At the next school election he was asked to leave, no matter what good qualities he might have possessed.

Under compulsion, and led by a fear of God, some went to church on Sunday when there was ice for skating. Only a very few attended and sat drowsy and rosy-cheeked throughout the service, dreaming of to-morrow, or preparing to go to the ice as soon as the midnight hour struck, or fearing that perhaps thaw would set in.

However, the skating season seldom lasted as long as two weeks. For so short a time schools and stores and workshops could be closed without great harm. All through the winter everybody prepared for it and no one raised a word of protest. Even to leave one’s wife or mother at home for the cooking was criminal. One could snatch a bite somewhere on the ice, and in the evening fill up on something very hot and potent, like pea soup. No woman would voluntarily stay home, anyway.

V

If skating marked the peak of hilarity, funerals plumbed the depths of the gloomy and macabre. The reason for this might be logical, especially in a town like ours, which by people far around was called the Town of Widows. For years the widows in Wierum outnumbered the married women, and a whole street was called the Street of Widows. The casualties of the sea were heavy, and had been much heavier before I was born. One winter afternoon storm took the lives of more than seventy, and that, in a town of less than twelve hundred, left gaps. A winter season seldom passed without some four or five men drowning.

The town was also designated as the town which never slept, by townsmen of inland villages. Certainly enough, the ways of our people must have seemed strange and weird to outsiders. We accepted them. I was used to women who clattered to the dike at all hours of the night to stand on top of it amid sleeping sheep, looking out to sea, sniffing at the winds for evil weather, fretting with their hands held roofwise over their eyes, worrying, but inarticulate. Strangely, they would nearly always go singly, — even when two widows lived together, — perhaps meeting others who were returning, exchanging grave remarks about the weather, and then continuing singly on their way. Rarely were the nights quiet and the weather dependable. Even then wooden shoes clattered to the dike. And when there was the least evidence of storm they would clatter all night long, and gaunt black figures would stand on top of the dike, skirts tugging in the wind, while their men might lie safely home in bed, or more likely out in the graveyard or at sea, whence they had never returned.

Funerals epitomize much, especially funerals among fishing folk. I shall never forget those funerals; the impressions are indelible, for our new house with the blue-tiled roof had been built in the Lijk Straat.

Lijk Straat means Carcass Street, and all funeral processions passed through Lijk Straat. No fisherman lived on Carcass Street; no one with mind or stomach easily turned by stories of ghosts and witches ever dared to live on Carcass Street. Only the most enlightened — rather, the most callous — lived there. As children my brothers and I were regarded with awe whenever we dared to go home after dark.

Every time there was a funeral the church bell would toll lugubriously for hours. Finally from the house of mourning the preacher would emerge, followed by a bier draped in dull black cloth, carried on the shoulders of ten or twelve stalwart men, all dressed in unrelieved black. The minister’s white collar would be the only thing not black in the whole cortège. Following the bier would come the men, in order of kin, heads bowed, steps attuned to the bell’s sluggish tolling. These men would walk single file, sometimes as many as a hundred of them, for all the fishermen in town were interrelated, as no marriage to landlubbers was tolerated. The women, also single file, also in order of kin, and usually in larger numbers than the men, would follow, with heads bent, feet in step, their bodies draped to the toes in a long black sheet of linen which was held hood-like over the head, so that no part of the face was visible, and was clasped together in front of the mouth by a black gloved hand.

When the cortège passed, spectators would start guessing and surmising as to the identity of the women. Some were so adept at this that they could tell each woman in town by her stature or gait. After leaving the house of mourning, the procession wound itself very slowly around the town until it was back where it started from. Then, no matter what part of town this might happen to be, the cortège would start out once more, this time trailing slowly toward Lijk Straat and through it, for nothing could be called a funeral that did not pass through our street. From our windows I watched numerous processions pass. After the graveyard was reached, the procession would wind three times around the whole mound on which was the cemetery, surrounding the old church. Not until that was completed would it head its way toward the grave. This whole procedure might take hours, hence the selection of strong and powerful men as pallbearers.

Especially during the summer did the town live up to its reputation as a town of widows. Very few besides women could be seen, except boys not yet twelve—that is, of course, in the section where the fishing people lived. During the summer all capable men departed to hire themselves off on fishing luggers in Bremen or Hamburg in Germany, rarely on Holland vessels. Soon after this, the anxiety among the women would grow intense, and, when storms threatened, restlessness was evident everywhere. It was contagious. As soon as the telegraph messenger emerged from the telegraph office, the town’s women would flock to him, and not until all the men and luggers had been heard from was there ease again. To relieve their anxiety and waiting, some of the stronger women would hire themselves out to work in the fields, but never on a day when the sky was cloudy.

During summer days the town emptied itself. Everyone but the tradesmen flocked to the fields around the town. Nearly everybody had a few acres to work, or helped out farmers. They worked in the fields from threethirty in the morning till six at night, interrupted twice by the tolling of the old tower bell to call them home for their meals, which were never eaten anywhere but at home. They might have to walk nearly a mile from their particular fields and as far back again, but that did not matter. The meals were partaken of in unhurried fashion, and all took at least thirty minutes of rest before they started for the fields again.

The processions from the fields toward town when the bell tolled were always worth watching, especially the final homecoming at six. Standing on the high dike, one hears other village bells toll. Soon one learns to recognize each particular chime by its own timbre. Till then the roads stretch white and empty, but no sooner have the bells left off than the roads start to fill up with people heading toward town, or going in groups toward other villages. On quiet evenings when there is ebbtide, the voices and laughter can be heard far off. After the pedestrians have reached home, wagons come rumbling in over the bridges, and day is done. The town has withdrawn itself from the outside world. No one leaves, no one comes. Actually it is not until then that the town comes back to life, in spite of the very early rising hours in the morning.

No scene brings such nostalgia in retrospect as this six-o’clock homecoming. To be outside of the town, say at nine in the evening, with large melancholy cows watching one, with frogs shrill in the ditches and the scent of clover cloying, always gave me a frantic and hunted feeling, such as a chick must have when the mother hen is far away. Especially when laughter and singing came from the town, over the silent fields, the anguish was almost unbearable.

VI

But there are numerous other things to recall and to record. Perhaps I should mention holidays, like New Year’s Day, when all grown men got drunk and each child received a fivecent piece to buy the only orange it would ever eat during the year, when street fights and brawls were inevitable, and when the only policeman allotted to the town managed to stay on his side of the canal, well out of sight, realizing more than ever how little authority he had. All quarrels were settled by the villagers in their own way. Only when thievery had occurred was the policeman allowed to come in the town to investigate, for stealing was an abhorrence, and practised so infrequently that usually the policeman raised his garden crops undisturbed and grew more and more rotund and lazy.

In Wierum, Christmas is not celebrated beyond one church service. The gift day is Sint Nickolaas Day, the sixth of December. That day is mainly for children, while the Eve of Sint Nickolaas proves a ghastly ordeal to them, except when they have become unusually hardened. On that evening horribly dressed men, with raw intestines of cows and pigs hanging from their sides, painted frightfully, with eyes of dead barnyard animals glued to their faces, come to the house to put one in the right spirit for Sint Nickolaas. Anyone is allowed to come, and the more popular your parents are, the greater will be your allowance of suffering during the evening.

Parents are not supposed to interfere, even though the evening is an utter nightmare for their children. The men proceed to frighten the children, by all possible means and devices, until they have been driven to a point of hysteria. Not until then do parents dare to step in and intervene. When enough fear and fright have been administered, the men depart, leaving a small gift for each child in the kitchen, and other men come to practise their arts. I remember Sint Nickolaas Eves when I was so frightened that I was afraid to go to sleep for nights afterward. But, to keep their good standing in the community, parents simply had to tolerate all this.

There were two other holidays of some importance, the birthdays of Queen Wilhelmina and Princess Juliana, days of eating, feasting, singing, music, costuming, and parades, quite the most exciting days of the year.

I was thirteen when I left the town. I have not been back, yet I know that much of it remains unchanged. There are a few automobiles, and tourists can reach it now by bus, but tourists don’t. Life seems to go on as before, slightly modernized, with the fishermen somewhat less hostile to the English, with fewer widows as drownings decrease each year and more fishermen are forced to make a livelihood on the land, with already a thought warily turned to the time when the government will come and dry up their sea as it is doing with the Zuider Zee.

But the essence of the town remains, in retrospect sometimes a little blurred romantically, quite often sharpened when compared with everything that life in these United States stands for. After all, I was only thirteen, and still had part of my childhood to live, and I can make some comparisons. We came with very strange conceptions of a country which looked so huge on the maps, without canals, with large cities. We could not understand it, for we could not account for the wide spaces between those cities. Somehow there had to be Indians swarming near the shadows of the skyscrapers, and after all it was not so many years ago that Eliza had fled over the ice-filled Ohio followed by bloodhounds, perhaps the most definite picture a Dutch child has of America, in spite of good maps, much geography, and an array of facts, names, and statistics. But there is no need for comparisons, or of naming new understandings or disillusions. The old town remains by the gray North Sea with gulls shrieking over it. It is a part of me.