The Nieuwe Kerk would be nothing without its tower--it is one of the barest and least interesting churches in a country which has reduced to the finest point the art of denuding religion of mystery--but the stadhuis would still be wonderful even without its Betsy, There is nothing else like it in Holland, nothing anywhere quite so charming in its shameless happy floridity.

I cannot describe it: the building is too complicated, too ornate; I can only say that it is wholly captivating and thoroughly out of keeping with the Dutch genius--Spanish influence again apparent.

Beneath the eaves are four and twenty statues of the Counts of Holland and Zeeland, and the roof is like a mass-meeting of dormer windows.
In addition to the stadhuis museum, which is dedicated to the history of Middelburg and Zeeland, the town has also a municipal museum, too largely given over to shells and stuffed birds, but containing also such human relics as the wheel on which Admiral de Ruyter as a boy helped his father to make rope, and also the first microscope and the first telescope, both the work of Zacharias Jansen, a Zeeland mathematician.

More interesting perhaps are the rooms in the old Zeeland manner, corresponding to the Hindeloopen rooms which we have seen at Leeuwarden, but lacking their cheerful richness of ornamentation.

It is certainly a museum that should be visited, albeit the stuffed birds weigh heavily on the brow.
After all, Middelburg's best museum is itself.