and drawn by oxen life seems more and quiet in holland than elsewhere and for this reason i like holland and i think i shall always remember this street the great professor lives in a little house at the end of it with one servant and when we went to see him i watched her in the and i thought of the pictures we had seen in the galleries professor is a nice old man short and fat and he wore a red dressing gown his furniture was the same as one sees in hotels � and chairs covered with and everywhere the lake there were books and i think there were more than newspapers i don t think i ever saw so many every corner was filled with them he and mr talked in french so it was difficult for me to follow the conversation i heard however the names of my good friends and and came in for a good deal of criticism that i know for mr dictated to me the professor s views on the worthy and these views it appears are most important when we got out of the house he explained to me what these views were but i have got so much else to tell you that we will omit from this letter i might very well omit the mention of the two pictures that hung on the professor s walls but they interested me so i will tell you that they were two portraits painted by now i wonder how these two portraits of pretty women ever found their way into the professor s house did the professor ever care for pretty women i wonder and i suppose i shall go on wondering for my curiosity on this point is not likely to be satisfied from we went to to see s pictures and we saw some six or seven each thirty feet long by twenty feet high in in full face in three quarter face there are about thirty in each picture and that would make heads hands � well perhaps not quite so many perhaps all the hands are not shown i cannot tell i how many painted and the lake these pictures contain but painting one everything is so perfect that the pictures lack humanity they seem a little mechanical mr calls the of painting and i do not think the comparison is he is the d he whose wrist never over whose guard a thrust never comes this is mr s picturesque way of expressing himself i think a somewhat comparison would help you to understand why i don t seem to like these pictures i cannot admire thirty heads all a row pictures of this kind reminded me too much of the inside of but his picture of the old women a picture painted when he was eighty is quite different it is full of emotion and beauty seems to have grown tender and sentimental in his old age or was it that he merely painted these old women to please himself whereas he painted the at so much a head there is no suspicion of the in the picture of the old women he saw them together in the they made a group a harmony and he was moved by the spectacle of the poor old women fading like flowers having only a few years to old women in their last shelter an he was at that time as old as any of his and the picture of the old men which he began immediately after was never finished i suppose that one morning he felt unable to paint he grew fainter and died when one has seen there is nothing else to see in one walks about until the train comes to take one away that i did not take a note of the the lake weariness i experienced during one dusty afternoon i not a matter for regret i recollect the afternoon sufficiently well � the walk along the dusty roads by little woods dusty as the roads and the tea we had at a very uncomfortable hotel in a barren room there seemed to be no one in the hotel except the proprietor and he cheated us charging two shillings for a cup of tea which made mr very angry the in holland are small or they seem small and the miserable dutch landscape irritated me hour after hour i sat looking at flat fields sometimes i counted the number of in each field i don t know what the others did they sat in the comer of the carriage we had been together since early morning and were a little tired of each other i don t think any of us had anything to say you can hardly believe that i had nothing to say well believe it or not as you like but i didn t speak a word and when i don t speak i always feel cross we left by the four o clock train and i felt grateful when night came and blotted the landscape out the train seemed as if it were going to on forever it into and out of many a little station and we were so hot in our first class carriage that we got into a third the change was a pleasant one after a time some got in and they reminded us of the pictures we had seen but one can t go on considering forever and at last unable to contain myself i said now what are you thinking of mr do you know you haven t spoken to me for two hours are j a new french poem the lake it i t t it t it well no not exactly but the in the second of the little poem i composed in the train coming from the are all and in french verse should rhyme as much as possible 