watchmen-watchmen who can not at all times | province of North Holland, there was forty-five echo the salutation that one receives from the peasants of the country, nor the cry which one still hears from the night-patrol of the old Dutch cities, "All's well!" A sudden rush of wind piling the waters to an extraordinary height over some low or softened portion of the separating wall startles a whole country from its quiet.

As in Constantinople the first alarm of fire calls the water-carriers and spare police, the second the proprietors and officers of State, and the third the Sultan himself to the scene of disaster, so in Holland continued rush of water admits of no idle spectators, but calls every hand capable of wielding a spade or bearing a bundle of rushes to aid in preventing devastation worse than conflagration. Sometimes the sea has proved ungovernable in its caprice, has swept over and retained what was before inhabited country. At other times it has just as capriciously retired from the bounds so carefully built up for its government, and left rich flats of mud to grow up into cheese-producing districts where its waves formerly bore luggers of the produce of other countries. All these sea changes are carefully noted, and assisted or guarded against, as far as possible, by artificial means. Shifting of the sands, or the mud-bars, or the vegetable growth at the bottom of the sea, turns a current against the base of a dyke. If the change seems temporary, a net-work of willow boughs is woven along the face of the dyke for rods or for miles, as the case may seem to demand; rows of stakes are driven in every direction through that network, and basket breakwaters jut at frequent intervals into the aggressive stream. If the aggression is likely to prove permanent and powerful, then strong piles take the places of the slender stakes, and heavy stone and brick walls rise | where the willow ones seemed insufficient. If, on the contrary, the water appears inclined to recede instead of advancing, and if the retrocession appears desirable, then Datch patience and ingenuity assist the rising earth by every mode they can invent. Rows of willow stakes, patches of basket-work, bits of low wall, coax deposits of sand and mud, and the appearance of vegetation. Whenever the reeds begin to appear they are turned to account. The finer patches are cut and cured for the thatching of houses, mills, out-buildings, piles of drying bricks and turf, and for exportation to England. The coarser ones are bound in bundles, the size of a man's body, to assist in the laying of dykes, for the straightening the currents of streams, for retaining in bounds the mud gathered from the bottoms of the canals for manure, and for rotting into a dressing for the land already tilled. Sometimes bars make across the mouths of inlets or bays and leave shallow ponds or lakes of water neither fresh nor so salt as sea-water, to be slowly filled up to tillable height by growth and decay of vegetable matter, or to be dyked and drained as Haarlem Lake was drained a few years ago.

thousand acres of first-rate mud aching to be turned into Dutch cheeses for foreign markets, but which was smothered out of useful existence by just as many acres of brackish water twelve feet deep. About the same time there were divers Dutch fingers itching to feel of the guilders that forty-five thousand acres of rich meadows and pastures would produce; and fifteen years ago Government set about relieving that aching and itching.

There was a broad high dyke around it to keep this Haarlemmer Meer in position, which was kept up by certain companies who hold certain chartered privileges for draining the lands of the surrounding country and exacting pay for the same. Even the Government might not interfere with the privileges of these companies, and they objected to any movement of the waters of the lake which might prove detrimental to their interests. The Government erected threesteam-mills for the Rhinlanders' use; thus removing the first obstacle to the drying up of Haarlem Lake. The first mill was built at Spaarndam, and lifted water out of canals that came down by the sides of the lake, into the Y Zee, a height of three feet, at the rate of sixteen thousand cubic yards a minute, and commenced the removal of a sheet of water sixteen miles long, eight miles wide, and twelve feet deep.

The next operations were, to open and securely dyke a canal a hundred feet wide all around outside of the lake dyke, to connect that canal with the smaller canals, into which 350 windmills-yes, 350, that's the number-lifted water from the different levels around the lake, and to connect it with the sluices that let into the Y Zee and into the Hollands Yssel, a bayou of the Rhine. They next set at work, at different points on the margin of the lake, three steammills of 500-horse power each, that work twentyeight pumps, lifting altogether 56,000 gallons at a stroke, or 336,000 gallons a minute, fifteen feet high; and Haarlemmer Meer began rapidly to change to Haarlemmer Meer Polder, or, as one of the lake-men elegantly translated it, " Haarlemmer Meer coom dhry." As the dry land began to appear, the huge stacks of willow boughs bound in bundles, that had been gathered from all parts of the country, began to be laid in long rows up through the middle and at the different crossings of the lake, and the mud was scooped up and thrown over and between these rows to form banks for canals and to lay roads upon. After a layer of mud came another layer of willow boughs, then another layer of mud, and so on; and after the banks had hardened sufficiently to retain it, came gravel from the German rivers to spread over them, until fifty miles of broad deep canal and a hundred miles of passable roads separated Haarlem Lake Polder into a dozen great divisions. Then those dozen divisions were subdivided by such smaller canals in different directions as the levels seemed to demand, and Haarlem Lake was ready for sale just Fifteen years ago, in the southern part of the as the great marshes over in Jersey, the Monte

zuma marshes, the St. Clair marshes, the Sag-sterdam, passed by Halfweg, and provided for an

Two hundred years ago, the De Witts, the Schermerhorns, the Ten Eycks, the Van Zandts, the Langerfelts, the Van Winkles, and the Tromps-fathers and cousins of the men who dug our Erie canal and opened the way to Western immigration-formed one of those societies who set up a line of wind-mills around the Beem- grass. Though the tops of the trees, bare long ster Lake and pumped it into "Polder." It after the bases are leafed in the spring, again was twenty miles around, and twenty-five feet deep; and the basin is now full of the most independent De Witts, and Schermerhorns, and Langerfelts, and Van Winkles, that exist outside of Yankeeland, who are busily raising up VOL. XXIV.-No. 142.-FF

The Pennsylvania Dutchman who, when his tumn; canaries sing in his windows, swans and wife died, declared that he would rather have young cygnets sail over his canals; orchards, lost every cow on the place, was no kin to Beem- and osiers, and gardens, and bowers distinctly ster Dutchmen, or he would have placed a differ- mark the difference between his home and the ent estimate on his horned stock from what all main level that surrounds him where all is grass, that came to Beemster farmers giving their grass, grass, or water. cows preference over every thing else mortal. They are never overworked or underfed, as the wives and children sometimes are; they never lack blankets to keep them warm, nor shades to keep them cool; the warmest, best-built, and best-kept portion of the house is set apart for their winter habitation; their food is prepared with strict attention to their tastes; attendants sleep in their apartments to see that no harm comes to them by night; milkers are regularly roused to their duties at three o'clock in the morning, and during the day a door is generally open from their halls to the rooms inhabited by the biped members of the family. Apart from these odorous prosaics, the Beemster cheesemaker is rather a poetic being than otherwise. He excessively admires the Hogarthian line of beauty, as exhibited over the arched neck and down the glossy back of his lively Dutch cob; tasty little kiosks, at the meeting of the waters, play at Oriental shelter during the brief but bright summer that visits his grounds; crocuses mark the coming of spring-time; dahlias drop their looped ribbons among the snow flakes of au

NORTH HOLLAND GIG.

Further on, north, just where the channel through which ships from Amsterdam issue into the open North Sea-just at what may be considered the head (if so flat an establishment may be said to have a head) of Holland-there rises a sloping sea-wall laid mostly of prismatic basaltic blocks, similar to those of the Giant's Causeway, brought from Norway, of a hundred feet in width to the top of a dyke which rises twenty-five feet above ordinary high-water mark, and is from a hundred to three hundred feet in thickness. Just at the point of the headland where this great dyke, which extends way down the coast across the Schardam, the Edam, the Monnikendam, the Nieuwendam, the Zaandam, the Spaarndam, the Amsteldam, and a hundred other dams; around all the nooks and corners of all the bays and inlets of the Y Sea, the great Southern Sea, the Lower Sea, away up the North Sea into Hanover; just where this great dyke meets the line of low sand hills known as "the Downs," that reach (except one break, which is triple dyked) down the west coast to the mouths of the Rhine; just there rises another form of dyke, and for another purpose than shutting out the waters. The first line is semicircular, is faced up with bricks to a thickness of from five to ten feet, and is surmounted by a row of great black guns looking out over the channel known in our maritime reports as Texel. Back of the semicircular dyke is a broad deep canal that surrounds other semicircular dykes, and some of the dykes take the forms of stars, and of round forts, and of zigzags, and of parallels, and of scarps and counterscarps; and some of them cover bomb-proof galleries for soldiers and magazines of ammunition and arms and provisions; and they surround barracks and stables and workshops, and form altogether the Helder Fort. And from the Helder a covered way extends a mile down the west coast to a star fort which surrounds the light-house; another dyke covers a way down midland to another collection of squares and zigzags at the back of the port known as Nieuwe Diep (newly dipped), and still another is to cover a way to another fort now building at the head of the port; and all these zigzags and circles form just such obstructions to the movements of outsiders as General Todleben raised up in front of the English, French, Sardinian, and Turkish forces at Sebastopol.

Securely lodged behind and under such earthbanks, soldiers may smoke their pipes in quiet so long as attacking parties see fit to plunge their shots and shells into the thick-roofed shelters; and it is only by such ingenious and persistent assaults as carried the Redan and Malakoff that many such works are to be carried in our time. There are some differences, however, in the Se