Vistula
and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in
the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.[736] [See
ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through
Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has
given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar
isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the
peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon
English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond
Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.[737]

[Sidenote: Swamps as places of refuge.]

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths
and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for
individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have
played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North
Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away
slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated
Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the
native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid
mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks
of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls,
despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to
the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum
of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for
fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat
thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt
against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney
among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the
Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex
in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of
sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two
hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to
William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader
Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last
constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of
Refuge."[741]

[Sidenote: The spirit of the marshes.]

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these
small and scarcely hab