I know no houses that so keep their secrets.

In every one, I doubt not, is furniture worthy of the exterior: old paintings of Dutch gentlemen and gentlewomen, a landscape or two, a girl with a lute and a few tavern scenes; old silver windmills; and plate upon plate of serene blue Delft.

(You may see what I mean in the Suasso rooms at the Stedelijk Museum.) I have walked and idled in the Keizersgracht at all times of the day, but have never seen any real signs of life.

Mats have been banged on its doorsteps by clean Dutch maidservants armed with wicker beaters; milk has been brought in huge cans of brass and copper shining like the sun; but of its life proper the gracht has given no sign.

Its true life is houseridden, behind those spotless and very beautiful lace curtains, and there it remains.
One of the wittiest of the old writers on Holland (of whom I said something in the second chapter), Owen Feltham the moralist, describes in his _Brief Character of the Low Countries_ an Amsterdam house of the middle of the seventeenth century.