-day as the North Sea Canal. In the times of which this page of
history tells, however, the canal was represented by a great drainage
dyke, and Velsen was but a deserted village. Indeed, hereabouts all the
country was deserted, for some years before a Spanish force had passed
through it, burning, slaying, laying waste, so that few were left to
tend the windmills and repair the dyke. Holland is a country won from
swamps and seas, and if the water is not pumped out of it, and the
ditches are not cleaned, very quickly it relapses into primeval marsh;
indeed, it is fortunate if the ocean, bursting through the feeble
barriers reared by the industry of man, does not turn it into vast
lagoons of salt water.

Once the Red Mill had been a pumping station, which, when the huge sails
worked, delivered the water from the fertile meadows into the great
dyke, whence it ran through sluice gates to the North Sea. Now, although
the embankment of this dyke still held, the meadows had gone back into
swamps. Rising out of these--for it was situated upon a low mound of
earth, raised, doubtless, as a point of refuge by marsh-dwellers
who lived and died before history began, towered the wreck of a
narrow-waisted windmill, built of brick below and wood above, of very
lonesome and commanding appearance in its gaunt solitude. There were no
houses near it, no cattle grazed about its foot; it was a dead thing in
a dead landscape. To the left, but separated from it by a wide and slimy
dyke, whence in times of flood the thick, brackish water trickled to the
plain, stretched an arid area of sand-dunes, clothed with sparse grass,
that grew like bristles upon the back of a wild hog. Beyond these dunes
the ocean roared and moaned and whispered hungrily as the wind and
weather stirred its depths. In front, not fifty paces away, ran the big
dyke like a raised road, secured by embankments, and discharging day by
day its millions of gallons of water into the sea. But these embankments
were weakening now, and here and there could be seen a spot which looked
as though a giant ploughshare had been drawn up them, for a groove of
brown earth scarred the face of green, where in some winter flood the
water had poured over to find its level, cutting them like cheese, but
when its volume sank, leaving them still standing, and as yet sufficient
for their purpose.

To the right again and behind, were more marshes, broken only in the
distance by the towers of Haarlem