In this second book, published two years after the Zuiderzee tour, Havard and his travelling companion, the aristocratic landscape painter Baron de Constant-Rebecque, make a tour of the Northern and Eastern provinces of the Netherlands, starting off in Friesland and Groningen and then heading south parallel to the German border — roughly along the line of what is now the Pieterpad long-distance walking trail — to end up in Maastricht. They stop off to look at historic cities, dolmens, country estates, prisons, fortresses, pretty girls, and other features of interest along the way, and Havard comments on what he sees, learnedly, romantically, wittily or caustically according to the case. The book is illustrated with a dozen or so etchings by Constant-Rebecque, mostly of churches or town-halls.

The hook Havard uses to hang the book on is a German school geography textbook he has come across that describes the Netherlands, together with Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, as Deutsche Aussenländer — states that are not currently part of the German Empire but are German in all other important respects. He's alarmed when his German academic acquaintances fail to be shocked by this, and reflects that when "thirty million squareheads" are fed this sort of thing from the cradle, they're not likely to object if their Kaiser decides to correct these little political inconsistencies. (Given his own recent experiences with the Prussian army, and the likely mood of his French readers, "squareheads" seems pretty mild...) Anyway, this gives him the idea of visiting the frontier areas and showing us how characteristically Dutch they are, and how different their history and cultural background is from Germany. At a couple of points he reminds us how recently German border regions like Bentheim, Berg and Kleve have been made to give up speaking Dutch and integrated into the Prussian education system.

But this is really only a hook, and it's integrated so loosely into the book that it can easily be cut out of the German edition. The main feeling we get from the book is the great pleasure Havard takes in discovering Dutch history and the artefacts it has left behind. He finds a lot of little things to criticise, but — except for the rare cases when they meet unfriendly innkeepers or burgemeesters — he's always careful to make it clear that these are minor blemishes and that the Netherlands is a fantastic place to explore, especially if you like architecture, painting and accounts of old sieges. ( )