The special lion of Franeker, which I visited on my way back from Harlingen, is the Planetarium of Eisa Eisinga, a mathematician and wool-comber, who constructed it alone in his back parlour between 1774 and 1781.  Interest in planetaria is, I should say, an acquired taste; but there can be no doubt as to the industry and ingenuity of this inventor.  The wonders of the celestial law are unfolded by a very tired young woman, whose attitude to the solar system is probably similar to that of Miss Jellyby to Africa.  After her lecture one stumbles upstairs to see the clock-work which controls the spheres, and is then free once more.

Franeker is proud also of her tombstones in the great church, but it is, I fancy, Eisa Eisinga whom she most admires.  She was once the seat of an honourable University, which Napoleon suppressed in 1811.  Her learning gone, she remains a very pleasant and clean little town.  By some happy arrangement all the painting seems to be done at once—­so different from London, where a fresh facade only serves to emphasise a dingy one.  But although the quality of the paint can be commended, the painters of Franeker are undoubtedly allowed too much liberty.  They should not have been permitted to spread their colour on the statues of the stadhuis.

The principal street has an avenue of elm trees down its midst, in the place where a canal would be expected; but canals traverse the town too.  Upon the deck of a peat barge I watched a small grave child taking steady and unsmiling exercise on a rocking horse.

I did not go to Dokkum, which lies at the extreme north of Friesland.  Mr. Doughty, the author of an interesting book of Dutch travel, called Friesland Meres—­he was the first that ever burst into these silent canals in a Norfolk wherry—­gives Dokkum a very bad character, and so do other travellers.  It seems indeed always to have been an unruly and inhospitable town.  As long ago as 853 it was resisting the entry of strangers.  The strangers were Saint Boniface and his companion, whom Dokkum straightway massacred.  King Pepin was furious and sent an army on a punitive mission; while Heaven supplemented Pepin’s efforts by permanently stigmatising the people of the town, all the men thenceforward being marked by a white tuft of hair and all the women by a bald patch.

At Leeuwarden is a patriotic society known as the “Vereenigung tot bevordering van vreemdelingenverkeer,” whose ambition, as their title suggests, is to draw strangers to the town; and as part of their campaign they have issued a little guide to Leeuwarden and its environs, in English.  It is an excellent book.  The preface begins thus:—­