age, there is no difficulty
in filling them with water. In other countries, when a canal is to be
made, the very first question is, How is it to be filled? For this
purpose the engineer explores the whole country through which the canal
is to pass, to find rivers and streams that he can turn into it, when
the bed of it shall have been excavated; and sometimes he has to bring
these supplies of water for a great distance in artificial channels,
which often cross valleys by means of great aqueducts built up to hold
them. Sometimes a brook is in this way brought across a river,--the
river itself not being high enough to feed the canal.

The people of Holland have no such difficulties as these to encounter in
their canals. The whole country being so nearly on a level with the sea,
they have nothing to do, when they wish for a canal, but to extend it in
some part to the sea shore, and then open a sluice way and let the water
in.

It is true that sometimes they have to provide means to prevent the
ingress of too much water; but this is very easily done.

It is thus so easy to make canals in Holland, that the people have been
making them for hundreds of years, until now almost the whole country is
intersected every where with canals, as other countries are with roads.
Almost all the traffic, and, until lately, almost all the travel of the
country, has been upon the canals. There are private canals, too, as
well as public. A farmer brings home his hay and grain from his fields
by water, and when he buys a new piece of land he makes a canal to it,
as a Vermont farmer would make a road to a new pasture or wood lot that
he had been buying.

Rollo wished very much to see all these things--but there was one
question which it puzzled him very much to decide, and that was whether
he would rather go to Holland in the summer or in the winter.

"I am not certain," said he to his mother one day, "whether it would not
be better for me to go in the winter."

"It is very cold there in the winter," said his mother; "so I am told."

"That is the very thing," said Rollo. "They have such excellent skating
on the canals. I want to see the boats go on the canals, and I want to
see the skating, and I don't know which I want to see most."

"Yes," said his mother, "I recollect to have often seen pictures of
skating on the Dutch canals."

"And I read, when I was a boy," continued Rollo, "that the women skate
to market in Holland."

Rollo he