They do not swim in it, they do not race on it, they do not row for pleasure at all.

Water is their servant, never a light-hearted companion.
I can think of no more reposeful holiday than to step on board one of these barges wedged together in a Rotterdam canal, and never lifting a finger to alter the natural course of events--to accelerate or divert--be earned by it to, say, Harlingen, in Friesland: between the meadows; under the noses of the great black and white cows; past herons fishing in the rushes; through little villages with dazzling milk-cans being scoured on the banks, and the good-wives washing, and saturnine smokers in black velvet slippers passing the time of day; through big towns, by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate screen of leaves; under low bridges crowded with children; through narrow locks; ever moving, moving, slowly and surely, sometimes sailing, sometimes quanting, sometimes being towed, with the wide Dutch sky overhead, and the plovers crying in it, and the clean west wind driving the windmills, and everything just as it was in Rembrandt's day and just as it will be five hundred years hence.
Holland when all is said is a country of canals.

It may have cities and pictures, windmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter costumes, but it is a country of canals before all.

The canals set the tune.

The canals keep it deliberate and wise.
One can be in Rotterdam, or in whatever town one's travels really begin, but a very short time without discovering that the Dutch unit--the florin--is a very unsatisfactory servant.