rdle." Across these canals are smaller canals
running diagonally and the city itself is as though built on a thousand
islands.

These larger canals are almost filled with ships of various sizes and
boats and barges fill the smaller ones. The city has the appearance of
being built on the water, canals serving the purposes of streets. The
ground used to be a great marsh and the entire city is practically built
on piles which are driven down sometimes eighty feet.

One great palace in the city stands upon fourteen thousand piles. One
would think the buildings would collapse in the course of time, and some
of them are all out of shape, but the people are so used to seeing the
buildings lean, almost like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that they think
nothing about it. Once in awhile the road will give way under a heavily
loaded truck, but they pry the load out, repair the roadway, and go
ahead as though the highway were built upon solid rock.

That the people of Amsterdam are religious is shown by the fact that
there are many large churches in the city. The front of the great palace
called the Dam has a hundred windows and only one little insignificant
entrance. It has been called "the palace without a door." Just across
the square is the Exchange with a great portico supported by seventeen
columns. Some have called this "A door without a house."

Like New York, Amsterdam has its Ghetto, in which more than sixty
thousand Jews are packed almost like sardines in a box, and most of
these live in the direst poverty and misery imaginable. However, just
beside this Ghetto live wealthy Jewish families, and one of the great
synagogues is so magnificent that they claim it represents the Temple of
Solomon.

As noted above the gigantic task of draining the Zuyder Zee has already
been started. This great lake is a hundred miles long and half as wide,
and used to be a great forest. Between seven and eight hundred years
ago, this forest and some better lands consisting of farm lands and
cities, were destroyed by the River Chim. A writer in the Scientific
American, quoted in the Literary Digest, says:

"Then Neptune looked down with longing eyes for his own. About the
middle of the thirteenth century, the North Sea broke through the upper
sand dunes and swept over the land. Hundreds of villages with their
inhabitants were engulfed and destroyed. Geographical continuity was
obliterated, and Holland found herself cut in two by an ocean
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