These rooms are
furnished exactly as they would have been by the best Dutch families,
their furniture and hangings having been brought from old houses in
the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht. The kitchen is one of the
prettiest things in Holland--with its shining brass and copper, its
delicate and dainty tiles and its air of cheerful brightness. Some of
the carving in the other rooms is superb; the silver, the china, the
clocks are all of the choicest. The custodian has a childlike interest
in secret drawers and unexpected recesses, which he exhibits with a
gusto not habitual in the Dutch cicerone. For the run of these old
rooms a guelder is asked; one sees the three rooms on the other side
of the entrance hall for twenty-five cents, the church and museum unit
of Holland. But they are uninteresting beside the larger suite. They
consist of an old Dutch apothecary's shop and laboratory; a madhouse
cell; and the bedroom of a Dutch lady who has just presented her lord
with an infant. We see the mother in bed, a doctor at her side, and
in the foreground a nurse holding the baby. Except that the costumes
and accessories are authentic the tableau is in no way superior to
an ordinary waxwork.
At the beginning of the last chapter I said that the Keizersgracht and
Heerengracht do not divulge their secrets; they present an impassive
and inscrutable front, grave and sombre, often black as night, beyond
which the foreigner may not penetrate.
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