Nothing could be less like the Holland of the earlier days of my wanderings--nothing, that is, that was around me, but with the farther bank of the river the flatness instantly begins and continues as far as one can see in the north.
It was a very beautiful morning in May, and as I rested now and then among the resinous pines I was conscious of being traitorous to England in wandering here at all.

No one ought to be out of England in April and May.

At one point I met a squirrel--just such a nimble short-tempered squirrel as those which scold and hide in the top branches of the fir trees near my own home in Kent--and my sense of guilt increased; but when, on my way back, in a garden near Arnheim I heard a nightingale, the treachery was complete.
And this reminds me that the best poem of the most charming figure in Dutch literature--Tesselschade Visscher--is about the nightingale.

The story of this poetess and her friends belongs more properly to Amsterdam, or to Alkmaar, but it may as well be told here while the Arnheim nightingale--the only nightingale that I heard in Holland--is plaining and exulting.
Tesselschade was the daughter of the poet and rhetorician Roemer Visscher.

She was born on 25th March, 1594, and earned her curious name from the circumstance that on the same day her father was wrecked off Texel.