Here, although it is separated from Scheveningen by some miles of sand,
I should like to say something of Katwyk--which is Leyden's marine
resort. A steam-tram carries people thither many times a day. The
rail, when first I travelled upon it, in April, ran through tulips;
in August, when I was there again, the patches of scarlet and orange
had given way to acres of massive purple-green cabbages which, in
the evening light, were vastly more beautiful.

At Rynsburg, one of the villages on the way, dwelt in 1650-51 Benedict
Spinoza, the philosopher, and there he wrote his abridgement of the
Meditations of Descartes, his master in philosophy, who had for a
while lived close by at Endegeest. Spinoza, who was born at Amsterdam
in 1632, died in 1677. His house at Rynsburg, which he shared with a
Colleginat (one of a sect of Remonstrants who had their headquarters
there) is now a Spinoza museum; his statue is at The Hague.

Katwyk-aan-Zee is a compact little pleasure resort with the usual
fantastic childish villas. Its most interesting possession is the
mouth of the Old Rhine, now restricted by a canal and controlled by
locks. There is perhaps no better example of the Dutch power over water
than the contrast between the present narrow canal through which the
river must disembogue and the unprofitable marsh which once spread
here. The locks, which are nearly a hundred years old, were among
the works of the engineer Conrad, whose monument is in Haarlem church.

From the Old Rhine's mouth to Noordwyk is a lonely but very bracing
walk of three miles along the sand, with the dunes on one's right
hand and the sea on one's left. One may meet perhaps a few shell
gatherers, but no one else. We drove before us all the way a white
company consisting of a score of gulls, twice as many tern, two oyster