The city’s architectural jewel is the Chancellerie, a very ornate but quite successful building dating from the sixteenth century:  first the residence of the Chancellors, recently a prison, and now the Record Office of Friesland.  Not until the Middelburg stadhuis shall we see anything more cheerfully gay and decorative.  The little Weigh House is in its own way very charming.  But for gravity one must go to the Oldehof, a sombre tower on the ramparts of the city.  Once the sea washed its very walls.

To the ordinary traveller the most interesting things in the Leeuwarden museum, which is opposite the Chancellerie, are the Hindeloopen rooms which I have described in the last chapter; but to the antiquary it offers great entertainment.  Among ancient relics which the spade has revealed are some very early Frisian tobacco pipes.  Among the pictures, for the most part very poor, is a dashing Carolus Duran and a very beautiful little Daubigny.

Affiliated to the museum is one of the best collections of Delft china in Holland—­a wonderful banquet of blue.  This alone makes it necessary to visit Leeuwarden.

All about Leeuwarden the boys have jumping poles for the ditches, and you may see dozens at a time, after school, leaping backwards and forwards over the streams, like frogs.  Children abound in Friesland:  the towns are filled with boys and girls; but one sees few babies.  In Holland the very old and the very young are alike invisible.

One of the first things that I noticed at Leeuwarden was the presence of a new bird.  Hitherto I had seen only the familiar birds that we know at home, except for a stork here and there and more herons than one catches sight of in England save in the neighbourhood of one of our infrequent heronries.  But at Leeuwarden you find, sweeping and plaining over the canals, the beautiful tern, otherwise known as the sea swallow, white and powerful and delicately graceful, and possessed of a double portion of the melancholy of birds of the sea.  Of the bittern, which is said to boom continually over the Friesland meres, I caught no glimpse and heard no sound.

From Leeuwarden I rode one Sunday morning by the steam-tram to St. Jacobie Parochie, a little village in the extreme north-west, where I proposed to take a walk upon the great dyke.  It was a chilly morning, and I was glad to be inside the compartment as we rattled along the road.  The only other occupant was a young minister in a white tie, puffing comfortably at his cigar, which in the manner of so many Dutchmen he seemed to eat as he smoked.  For a while we were raced—­and for a few yards beaten—­by two jolly boys in a barrow drawn by a pair of gallant dogs who foamed past us ventre a terre with six inches of flapping tongue.