One should be in Holland then.

It is no country for hot weather: it has no shade, the trains become unbearable, and the canals are very unpleasant.

But in spring it is always fresh.
Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period.

Thousands of florins were given for a single bulb.

The bulb, however, did not always change hands, often serving merely as a gambling basis; it even may not have existed at all.