dred and fifty-nine, and the Exchange on thirtyfour thousand piles, and that whole cities must be braced up after the same manner. Only when mid-winter seals up the avenues of intercourse are the nomads stationary; but even then only heavy kinds of commerce wait for the warmer atmosphere, as boat-sails are easy to rig upon sleighs, and help to push light freights across plains of ice. The spirits of the people seem to go up as the mercury in the thermometer falls, and the canals, still tracks of travel, change their appearance from sluggish, indolence-breeding routes for drudges to the gayest of sprightly promenades. Skates drop from the rafters of garrets, spring from the bottoms of chests, slide from out-o'-the-way corners of cupboards, seem like seventeen-year locusts to rise out of the ground, or to have been the inseparable companions of half the people of the colder parts of Holland; and on a clear, bracing morning business and pleasure mingle so freely and rapidly upon glare ice that the steadiest devotee could scarcely decide which it was he followed. A tour on skates among these people would be one of the most agreeable and instruct ive that the world offers to an American traveler. Skimming over the ice in company with all classes of people, high and low, rich and poor, old and young, at a time when all are wanting to be polite and communicative, would add rapidly to his stock of knowledge, and fill his time so full of novelty as to leave no room for ennui. Parties of pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, would hail his coming as likely to add to their delight by giving them opportunity of dividing with him, that which they already enjoyed. The poor woman, resting from her load of marketing, would meekly ask him to assist in lifting her heavy sack of potatoes or basket of butter on to her head for another start, and he would be a churl indeed, and unworthy the name American, if, possessing the requisite strength, he passed by on the other side, or if he assisted without feeling himself a better man for doing so. Young ladies, ruddy with health and exhilarating exercise, would accept his company while he treated them respectfully without inquiring whether he came from Fifth Avenue or Wall Street, or from Gooseville Four Corners. Trains of boys on little sleds, "spikers" too poor to buy skates, would DOOR-WAY OF PETER'S HOUSE race with him, and cheer the same whether they lost or won. The poor persons who clear the ways on the ice, and who keep the booths for hot coffee, would accept an occasional half cent with an earnest "God speed!" that would really lighten his tiring footsteps; Dutch smiles and hot coffee would await his coming at the village "Logement;" and as he dropped the skirts of the figured cotton canopy around the six-by-three box of goose feathers, woolen blankets, and American-man, Momus would slide his mellowest cloud before the day's panorama without entirely effacing its sparkling scenes from his view. I say that Holland is so commercial from necessity. Rich cargoes from her East India colonies and from Japan find their way up the mouths of the Meuse to Rotterdam, or are towed by steamers through the crooked channel of the Zuider Zee to Amsterdam, or else by horses through the great North Holland canal to the same entrepôt, and from there are distributed among the gentry of Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, in exchange for such necessaries of life as her own soil refuses to supply. Italy is to-day so beggarly simply because all the necessaries of life are procured with little labor in each one of her own provinces; the spur of destitution is not there to urge her people to activity and development. Austria is bankrupt, not because she lacks sources of wealth, but because she is shut from intercourse with other parts of the world; and Peter the Great deserved the affix to his name, if for no other reason than that he so audaciously occupied and improved the Russian channel of commerce. While among the Zaandam mills I could not, if I would, refrain from taking a look in at the door-way of the old cabin of Peter the Great; and I am now wishing that I could write the history of the extraordinary voluntary exile of that extraordinary man. How much more instructive and interesting a plain undoctored story of that Zaandam residence would be than the long, scho lastic biographies usually attached to the names surnamed the Great. Stories of the little friendships he formed with his neighbors of the little green wooden houses posted about on piles in the heart of Vaterland; stories of the little quarrels with his fellow ship-builders, who swung their axes more expertly than himself; stories of his little love makings as he hied Dutch lasses over Zaanstroom ice, would be perfect keys to the motives which induced him to accept the great Menchikoff for his minister, Suwarrow for his general, and Catharine for his empress. A plain unvarnished history of the caprices that led to, and the incidents that occurred during that sojourn of 1697, would assist us more to judge correctly of his right to be written "Great" than all the paid-for eulogies of his later existence. Certain it is that he accomplished the professed object of his mission-acquired information; and that he made a quick use of that information while building up a great capital in the midst of such swamps and marshes as surrounded him in Vaterland. His old house here has been rehoused by a substantial brick building, and with its increasing importance as a shrine for travelers calls up recollections of another old house that is now more grandly housed, more reverently attended, and more richly endowed; but who shall say how soon the increasing respect for the great Russian reformer, and Garibaldian revolu tions in Catholic States, shall cleave off the character of sanctity from the Holy House of Loretto, and attach it to this residence of a former head of the growing Greek branch! But as not one American in a hundred ever before heard of the Holy House of Loretto, and as I have a traveler's fondness for digressing from the main subject of my story, I will tell some of them what I remember about it. It is a little old brick house of two rooms and two outside doors, that stands twelve miles south of Ancona in Italy, in a magnificent church that was built for its honor and protection, at the top of a large hill not far from the Adriatic Sea. It professes to be the house in which Christ resided eight years at Nazareth; professes to have been moved by angels from Nazareth to a place of greater safety in Hungary. After centuries of quiet sojourn in Hungary troublous times urged another migration, and the same angels came one night and took the Holy House into Dalmatia. After five hundred or a thousand years of genteel seclusion there, some heathenish Dalmatians kicked up a row in its neighborhood, and the angels saw fit to take it again a journeying. Traveling always by night, it was at last set down in its present position, when it became the owner of a large tract of rich land, a village of houses for thousands of people, and two blackfaced images dressed in white satin, pointed all over with large diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. One honest-looking peasant was going, by short steps on his knees, round and round the little old house, reverently kissing the door stones each time he passed (I noticed that the door stones appeared quite new), until the knees of his breeches were all worn away, and his own seemed calloused by his penitential promenade. Czar Peter's house (Saint Peter's house, the boy-guides of Zaandam call it) contains, in the first and main room, the oak table and three chairs, his own handiwork, just as he left them a hundred and sixty odd years ago; little cupboard-like doors open into his bed box, and at the foot of the bed a low door leads into the other room of his cabin. Except where the portraits of himself and Catharine hang, the walls of that room are literally covered with the names of visitors, written in pencil, and, as usual, an American has occupied the most prominent place. Over the middle of the door-way, on a level with the eyes of a six-foot man, where the light strikes strongest, a Yankee has immortalized his name. "Returning to our muttons," as the Frenchman has it, there is one sort of evil which dyke-builders can not insure against; and I am winding off this paper in sight of the spires and high gables of sixteen villages sticking out of thirty feet of water and ice. The beginning of the current year (1861) was excessively cold; much snow has fallen; the ice running in "the Waal," a main bayou of the Rhine, dammed, and at three o'clock on the morning of the 7th the alarm-bells of the Bommel Polder warned the inhabitants to fly from the coming waters. Sixteen villages are inundated, twelve persons are missing; a single dyke protects for the present the city of Bommel. People are securing their property as best they may; bands of workmen and soldiers are watching and strengthening the lines; engineers and adjutants are on the move day and night; officers from the King's household are examining the locks and waste weirs throughout the whole region, and all Holland dreads the coming thaw. THE CHIROPODIST: A STORY OF THE WATERING-PLACES. I.-TRENTON FALLS. MR. HENRY BARTE FUm was out of three gentlemen who rode from the railroad station to Moore's Hotel, at Trenton Falls, on the top of an omnibus; and who, having clambered down from that lofty perch, under the inspection of forty pairs of eyes leveled at them from the balcony, hastened to inscribe their names in the book, and secure the keys of their several chambers. To no one of the three, however, was this privacy so welcome as to Mr. Bartlett, who, entering his room with flushed face, nervously dismissed the servant, locked the door, and dropped into a chair with a pant of relief. Our business being entirely with him, we shall at once dismiss his two companions-whom, indeed, we have only introduced as accessories to the principal figure—and, taking our invisible seats in the opposite chair, proceed to a contemplation of his person. features not weak in themselves. On further observation, we are inclined to believe that he has not achieved that easy poise of self-possession which, in men of becoming modesty, is the result of more or less social experience. He belongs, evidently, to that class of awkward, honest, warm-hearted, and sensitive natures whom all men like, and some women. Mr. Bartlett's reflections, after his arrival, were-we have good reason to know-after this fashion: "When will I cease to be a fool? Why couldn't I stare back at all those people on the balcony as coolly as the two fellows who sat beside me? Why couldn't I get down with Age-four, perhaps five and twenty-certainly not more; height, five feet nine inches, with well-developed breast and shoulders; limbs, whose firm, ample muscle betrays itself through the straight lines of his light summer costume, and hands and feet of agreeable shape; complexion fair, with a skin of feminine fineness and trans-out missing the step and grazing my shin on parency, whereon the uncontrollable blood writes the wheel? Why should I walk into the house his emotions so palpably that he who runs may with my head down, and a million of cold little read; eyes of a clear, honest blue, but so shy of needles pricking my back, because men and womeeting a steady gaze that few know how beau- men, and not sheep, were looking at me? I tiful they really are; mouth full and sensitive, have at least an average body, as men go-an and of so rich and dewy a red that we can not average intellect, too, I think; yet every day I help wishing he were a woman that we might see spindly, brainless squirts [Mr. Bartlett would be pardoned for kissing it; forehead broad, and not have used this epithet in conversation, but rather low; hair-but here we hesitate, for his it certainly passed through his mind] put me to enemies would certainly call it red. Indeed, shame by their self-possession. The women think in some lights it is red, but its prevailing tint is me a fool because I have not the courage to be brown, with a bronze lustre on the curls. As natural and unembarrassed, and I carry the conhe sits thus, unconscious of our observation, he sciousness of the fact about me whenever I meet is certainly handsome, in spite of a haunting air them. Come, come: this will never do. I am of timidity which weakens the expression of a man, and I ought to possess the ordinary res olution of a man. Now, here's a chance to turn over a new leaf. Nobody knows me; no one will notice me particularly; and whether I fail or succeed, the experiment will never be brought forward to my confusion hereafter." Full of a sudden courage he sprang to his feet, and carefully adjusted his toilet for the teatable, whistling cheerfully all the while. At the sound of the gong he descended the staircase, and approached the dining-room with head erect, meeting the gaze of the other guests with a steadiness which resembled defiance. He was surprised to find how mechanical and transitory were the glances he encountered. As Mr. Bartlett's friend, I should not like to assert that in his efforts to appear self-possessed he approached the bounds of effrontery; but I have my own private suspicions about the matter. At the table a lively conversation was carried on, and he was able to take many stealthy observations of the ladies without being noticed. To his shame I must confess that he had never been seriously in love, though it was a condition he most earnestly desired. Attracted toward women by the instinct of his nature, and repelled by his awkward embarrassment, there seemed little chance that he would ever attain it. On this particular occasion, however, he cast his eyes around with the air of a sultan scanning his slaves before throwing the handkerchief to the chosen one. The female guests-old, young, married, single, ill-fayored or beautiful-were subjected to the review. It is impossible to describe Mr. Bartlett's satisfaction with himself. could not see her features with distinctness. The face was a pure oval, in a frame-work of superb hair, and the glossy leaves of smilax glit tered like silver in the moonlight whenever she chanced to turn her head. There were songs, and she sang-" Scenes that are brightest," or something of the kind, suggested by the influences of the night. Her voice was clear and sweet, without much strength-- one of those voices which seem to be made for singing to one ear alone. "Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me," thought Mr. Bartlett. [He had just been reading the “Idyls of the King."] He slipped off to bed, saying to himself: "A little more courage, and I may be able to make her acquaintance." In the morning he set out to make the tour of the Falls. Entering the glen from below, he slowly crept up the black shelves of rock, under and around the rush of the amber waters. The naiads of Trenton, waving their scarfs of rainbow brede, tossed their foam fringes in his face: above, the dryads of the pine and beech looked down from their seats on the brink of the overhanging walls. Mr. Bartlett was neither a poet nor a painter, nor was it necessary; but his temperament (as you may know from his skin and the color of his hair) was joyous and excitable, and he felt a degree of delight that made him forget his own self. I fancy there are no embarrassing conventionalisms at the bottom of the earth-wherever that may be-and the glen at Trenton is two hundred feet on the way thither. Our friend enjoyed to the full this partial release, and was surprised to find that he could assist several married ladies to climb the slippery steps at the High Fall without consciously blushing. We had passed over twenty-nine of the thirtyfive ladies present without experiencing any special emotion; but at the thirtieth he was suddenly attacked by a recurrence of his habitual timidity. He fixed his eyes upon his How it came to pass he never could rightly toast, painfully conscious by the warmth of his tell, but certain it is that, on lifting his eyes ears that he was blushing violently, and act- after a long contemplation of the shifting slides ually drank a third cup of tea (one more than of fretted amber, he found himself alone in the his usual allowance) before he became sufficient-glen—with the exception of a young lady who ly composed to look up again. Really there sat on the rocks a few paces distant. At the was no cause for confusion. Her face was turn- first glance he thought it was a child, for the ed away, so that even the profile was not wholly slight form was habited in a Bloomer dress, and visible; but the exquisite line of the forehead a broad hat shaded the graceful head. The and cheek, bent inward at the angle of the un-wide trowsers were gathered around her ankles, seen eye, and melting into the sweep of the neck and shoulder, were the surest possible prophecies of beauty. Her chestnut hair, rippled at the temples, was gathered into a heavy, shining - knot at the back of her head, and inwoven with the varnished, heart-shaped leaves of the smilax. More than, this Mr. Bartlett did not dare to notice. During the evening he flitted restlessly about the rooms, intent on an object which he thus explained to himself: "I should like to see whether her front face corresponds to the outline of her cheek. I am alone; it is too late to visit the Falls, and a whim of this sort will help me to pass the time." But the lady belonged, apparently, to a numerous party, who took possession of one end of the balcony and sat in the moonlight, in such a position that he and a pair of the prettiest feet he had ever seen dangled in the edge of the swift stream. She was idly plucking up tufts of grass from the crevices of the rock, and tossing them in the mouth of the cataract, and her face was partly turned toward him. It was the fair unknown of the evening before! There was no mistaking the lovely cheek and the rippled chestnut hair. Mr. Bartlett felt-as he afterward expressed himself-a warm, sweet shudder run through all his veins. Alone with that lovely creature, be low the outside surface of the earth! "Oh, if I could but speak to her! Her dress shows that she can lay aside the soulless forms of society in such a place as this: why not I? There's Larkin, and Kirkland, and lots of fellows I know, wouldn't hesitate a moment. But what shall |