EUROPE TO-DAY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 228, 25 August 1938, Page 2

EUROPE TO-DAY.

A PEACEFUL SCENE. Of all modern writers perhaps Mr E. V. Lucas has most happily summed up the charm of Holland. This is how he writes in his book, “A Wanderer in Holland.” After a while one gets accustomed to the ever-present canal and the odd spectacle (to us) of masts in the streets and sails in the fields. I can think of no more reposeful holiday than to step on board one of these barges wedged together in a Rotterdam canal, and, never lifting a finger to alter the natural course of events —to accelerate or divert —be carried by it to, say, Harlingen, in Friesland : between the meadows; under the noses the great black and white cows; past herons fishing in the rushes; through little villages with dazzling milk-cans being scoured on the banks, and the good-wives washing, and saturnine smokers in black velvet slippers passing the time of day; through big towns, by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate screen of leaves; under low bridges crowded with children ; through narrow locks; ever moving, moving, slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, sometimes quanting, sometimes being towed, with the wide Dutch sky overhead, and the plovers crying in it, and the clean west wind driving the windmills, and everything just as it was in Rembrandt’s day and just ,as it will be five hundred years liGiice. Holland when all is said is a country of canals. It may have cities and pictures, windmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter costumes, but it is a country of canals before all. The canals set the tune. The canals keep it deliberate and wise.—(G).