iting the villages themselves, as they lie with their homesteads
scattered over the plain. Smaller canals surround the farms, the
meadows, and the kitchen-gardens, taking the place of walls and
hedges; every house is a little port. Ships, barges, boats, and rafts
sail through the villages, wind round the houses, and thread the
country in all directions, just as carts and carriages do in other
places.

And here, too, Holland has accomplished many gigantic works, such as
the William Canal in North Brabant, which, more than eighty kilometers
long and thirty meters wide, crosses the whole of Northern Holland and
unites Amsterdam to the North Sea: the new canal, the largest in
Europe, which will join Amsterdam to the ocean, across the downs, and
another, equally large, which will unite the town of Rotterdam to the
sea. The canals are the veins of Holland, and the water is its blood.

But, aside from the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the works
of defence, as one passes rapidly through Holland he sees on every
side indications of marvellous labor. The ground,--in other countries
the gift of nature,--is here the result of industry. Holland acquired
the greater part of its riches through commerce, but the earth had to
yield its fruits before commerce could exist; and there was no
earth--it had to be created. There were banks of sand, broken here and
there by layers of peat, and downs which the wind blew about and
scattered over the country; large expanses of muddy land, destined, as
it seemed, to eternal barrenness. Iron and coal, the first elements of
industry, were lacking; there was no wood, for the forests had already
been destroyed by storms before agriculture began; there was neither
stone nor metal. Nature, as a Dutch poet has said, had denied all its
gifts to Holland, and the Dutch were obliged to do everything in spite
of her. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they made
the ground fruitful by placing on it layers of soil brought from a
distance, just as a garden is formed; they spread the rubble from the
downs over the sodden meadows; they mixed bits of the peat taken from
the water with the earth that was too sandy; they dug up clay to give
a fresh fertility to the surface of the ground; they strove to till
the downs; and thus, by a thousand varied efforts, as they continually
warded off the threatening waters, they succeeded in cultivating
Holland as highly as other countries more favored by