Cuyp, and by countless artists since.

I steamed from Rotterdam to Dordrecht on a grey windy morning, on a
passenger boat bound ultimately for Nymwegen. We carried a very mixed
cargo. In a cage at the bows was a Friesland mare, while the whole
of the deck at the stern was piled high with motor spirit. Between
came myriad barrels of beer and other merchandise.

The course to Dordrecht (which it is simpler to call Dort) is up the
Maas for some miles; past shipbuilding yards, at Sylverdyk (where is
a great heronry) and Kinderdyk; past fishermen dropping their nets
for salmon, which they may take only on certain days, to give their
German brethren, higher up the river, a chance; past meadows golden
with marsh marigolds; past every kind of craft, most attractive of
all being the tjalcks with their brown or black sails and green-lined
hulls, not unlike those from Rochester which swim so steadily in the
reaches of the Thames about Greenwich. The journey takes an hour and
a half, the last half-hour being spent in a canal leading south from
the Maas and ultimately joining Dort's confluence of waters.

It is these rivers that give Dort her peculiar charm. There is a
little café on the quay facing the sunset where one may sit and lose
oneself in the eternally interesting movement of the shipping. I
found the town distracting under the incessant clanging of the tram
bell (yet grass grows among the paving-stones between the rails);
but there is no distraction opposite the sunset. On the evening that
I am remembering the sun left a sky of fiery orange barred by clouds
of essential blackness.

Dort's rivers are the Maas and the Waal, the Linge and the Merwede;