picturesque region.  Of course it will be, or has been, rebuilt.  We walked in the forest of Haarlem and did not once think of 125th Street; the old town is slightly unlike its modern namesake.  What a charm there is in this venerable forest.  The Dutch of Amsterdam, less than half an hour away, come down here on Sunday afternoons for the tranquillity and the shade.  You must know that the sun-rays can be very disturbing in July.  The canals intersecting the town are pretty.  They may be sinks of iniquity, but they don’t look so.  Naturally, they exhale mephitic odours, though the people won’t acknowledge it.  It is the case in Venice, which on hot August afternoons is not at all romantic in a nasal sense.  But you forget it all in Haarlem as you watch a hay barge float by, steered by a blond youngster of ten and poled by his brothers.  From the chimney comes a light smoke.  Soup is cooking.  You remember the old sunlit towpath of your boyhood; a tightening at your heart warns you of homesickness, or hay fever.  Oh, to be on the Erie Canal, you exclaim, as you sneeze.

But the Town Hall Museum is hard by.  It is the glory of Haarlem as the Rijks Museum is the glory of Amsterdam and Holland.  A pull at the bell and the door is opened, a small fee is paid, and you are free to the room where are hung ten large paintings by the inimitable Frans Hals.  Here are the world-renowned Regent pictures set forth in chronological order.  Drop the catalogue and use your own eyes.  The first impression is profound; not that Hals was profound in the sense of Rembrandt’s profundity, but because of the almost terrifying vitality of these portraits.  Prosaic men and women, great trenchermen, devourers of huge pasties, mowers down of wine-bottles and beer-tankards, they live with such vitality on the canvases of Hals that you instinctively lower your voice.  The paint-imprisoned ghosts of these jolly officers, sharpshooters, regents, and shrewd-looking old women regents are not so disquieting as Rembrandt’s misty evocations.  They touch hands with you across the centuries, and finally you wonder why they don’t step out the frame and greet you.  Withal, no trace of literalism, of obvious contours or tricky effects.  Honest, solid paint, but handled by the greatest master of the brush that ever lived—­save Velasquez.  How thin and unsubstantial modern painting is if compared to this magician, how even his greatest followers, Manet and Sargent, seem incomplete.  Manet, with his abridgments, his suppressions, his elliptical handling, never had the smiling confidence of Hals in facing a problem.  The Frenchman is more subtle, also more evasive; and there is no hint in him of the trite statement of a fact that we encounter in Bartholomew Van der Heist—­himself a great painter.  Hals had not the poetic vision of Rembrandt, but he possessed a more dexterous hand, a keener eye.  Judged according to the rubric of sheer paint, sheer brush-work, not Rubens, not Van Dyck, was such a virtuoso.  Despite his almost incredible swiftness of execution, Hals got closer to the surfaces of what is called “actual” life than any of the masters with the exception of the supreme Spaniard.