the voices of wild beasts and birds of
the ocean. The first people who had the courage to plant their tents
there, had to raise with their own hands dikes of earth to keep out the
rivers and the sea, and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon
desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters in
quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the eggs of
marine birds upon the sand.

Caesar, passing by, was the first to name this people. The other Latin
historians speak with compassion and respect of these intrepid
barbarians who lived upon a "floating land," exposed to the intemperance
of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious northern sea; and the
imagination pictures the Roman soldiers, who, from the heights of the
uttermost citadels of the empire, beaten by the waves, contemplated with
wonder and pity those wandering tribes upon their desolate land, like a
race accursed of heaven.

Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of the most
fertile, wealthiest, and best regulated of the countries of the world,
we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a conquest
made by man. But, it must be added, the conquest goes on forever.

To explain this fact--to show how the existence of Holland, in spite of
the great defensive works constructed by the inhabitants, demands an
incessant and most perilous struggle--it will be enough to touch here
and there upon a few of the principal vicissitudes of her physical
history, from the time when her inhabitants had already reduced her to a
habitable country.

Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the sixth
century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it may be said
every city, in Holland has its catastrophe to record. In thirteen
centuries, it is recorded that one great inundation, beside smaller
ones, has occurred every seven years; and the country being all plain,
these inundations were veritable floods. Towards the end of the
thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a part of a fertile peninsula near
the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the
course of the same century, a series of inundations opened an immense
chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death
of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the
Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-two villages
and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 t