Pile-driving on an extensive scale can be a very picturesque
sight. Breitner has painted several pile-driving scenes, one of which
hangs in the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam.

Statistics are always impressive. I have seen somewhere the number
of piles which support the new Bourse and the Central Station; but
I cannot now find them. The Royal Palace stands on 13,659. Erasmus
of Rotterdam made merry quite in the manner of an English humorist
over Amsterdam's wooden foundations. He twitted the inhabitants with
living on the tops of trees, like rooks. But as I lay awake from
daybreak to a civilised hour for two mornings in the Hotel Weimar at
Rotterdam--prevented from sleeping by the pile-driving for the hotel
extension--I thought of the apologue of the pot and the kettle.

I referred just now to the new Bourse. When I was at Amsterdam in 1897,
the water beside Damrak extended much farther towards the Dam than it
does now. Where now is the new Bourse was then shipping. But the new
Bourse looks stable enough to-day. As to its architectural charms,
opinions differ. My own feeling is that it is not a style that will
wear well. For a permanent public building something more classic is
probably desirable; and at Amsterdam, that city of sombre colouring,
I would have had darker hues than the red and yellow that have been
employed. The site of the old Bourse is now an open space.

It is stated that the kindly custom of allowing the children of
Amsterdam the run of the Bourse as a playground for a week every year
is some compensation for the suppression of the Kermis, but another
story makes the sanction a perpetual reward for an heroic deed against
the Spaniards performed by a child in 1622.