rs, penetrates the land and breaks it into
archipelagoes; the lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing and
recrossing each other, all combine to give the idea of a country that
may at any moment disintegrate and disappear. Seals and beavers would
seem to be its rightful inhabitants; but since there are men bold enough
to live in it, they surely cannot ever sleep in peace.

[Illustration: A DUTCH GIRL. Photogravure from Painting by [*illegible
name]]

What sort of a country Holland is, has been told by many in few words.
Napoleon said it was an alluvion of French rivers,--the Rhine, the
Scheldt, and the Meuse,--and with this pretext he added it to the
Empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land
and sea. Another, as an immense crust of earth floating on the water.
Others, an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end
of the earth and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud
and sand; and Philip II. called it the country nearest to hell.

But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in the same
words:--Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea; it is an
artificial country: the Hollanders made it; it exists because the
Hollanders preserve it; it will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall
abandon it.

To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was when first
inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of
a country.

It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous lakes, like
seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one tract after
another covered with brushwood; immense forests of pines, oaks, and
alders, traversed by herds of wild horses, and so thick were these
forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing from tree
to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep bays and gulfs
carried into the heart of the country the fury of the northern tempests.
Some provinces disappeared once every year under the waters of the sea,
and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was
impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without
sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and there
uncertain of their way, and slept in monstrous pools and ponds among the
sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place, swept by furious winds,
beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a perpetual fog, where nothing was
heard but the roar of the sea and