DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
   
   
   
   

NCE upon a time (last summer, in fact) we (which means two
of us) set out to see wind-mills.

You remember how Don Quixote, when he started to seek adven-
tures, “discovered thirty or forty wind-mills all together on the
plain,” and thinking them giants with arms two or three leagues
long, began to fight them, when a breeze of wind “springing up
drove the sails against him,” and sent him and his steed, Rosinante,
into the air; and how Sancho Panza intimated that the knight had
wind-mills in his own head. - You will, perhaps, think we were in the
same condition, But artists must be reckoned in with us in that
case, for, as every one knows, these picturesque structures have been
favorite subjects with them time out of mind—those ancient ones
which stand here and there on lonesome heights in Spain, and be-
yond all, the miles of them on the flats of Holland.

Of all the world, Holland is the wind-mill country; as one draws
near the shore there come in sight “wind-mills, cows, sheep, Dutch-
men, churches, steeples and little red-tiled houses,” but mostly
wind-mills, At Rotterdam, at Dordrecht; one finds them in North
Holland and in Friesland; sees them from the
Zuyder Zee, from every canal; but above all at Zaan-
dam, where they thrash the air, as one of the artists
says, and “grind every sort of thing that can be
ground, and when they don’t do that they saw wood
and pump water,” and “all the rich people are wind-
millers;” there are about four miles of them in all,
“as far into the dim distance” as the eye can reach,
so that “if any one desires to see Holland from its

A ROTTERDAM VISTA.