rs ago, finding
that the wind mills were not strong enough to pump it out, the
government concluded to try what virtue there might be in steam. So they
first repaired and strengthened the range of dikes that extended round
the lake. In fact, they made them double all around, leaving a space
between for a canal. They made both the inner and outer of these dikes
water-tight; so that the water should neither soak back into the lake
again, after it was pumped out, nor ooze out into the polders beyond.
The way they made them water-tight was by lining them on both sides with
a good thick coating of clay.

"When the dikes enclosing the lake were completed, the engineers set up
three very powerful steam engines, and gave to each one ten or twelve
enormous pumps to work. These pumping engines were made on such a grand
scale that they lifted over sixty tuns of water at every stroke. But yet
so large was the lake, and so vast the quantity of water to be drained,
that though there were three of the engines working at this rate, and
though they were kept at work night and day, it took them a year and a
half to lay the ground dry. The work was, however, at last accomplished,
and now, what was the bottom of the lake is all converted into pastures
and green fields. But they still have to keep the pumps going all the
time to lift out the surplus water that falls over the whole space in
rain. You may judge that the amount is very large that falls on a
district thirty miles round. They calculate that the quantity which they
have to pump up now, every year, in order to keep the land from being
overflowed again, is over fifty millions of tuns. And that is a quantity
larger than you can ever conceive of.

"And yet the piece of ground is so large, that the cost of this pumping
makes only about fifty cents for each acre of land, which is very
little.

"Besides these great spreading inundations, which Holland has always
been subject to from the lakes and rivers in the middle of the country,
there has always been a greater danger still to be feared from the ice
freshets of the Rhine, and other great rivers coming from the interior
of the country. The Rhine, you know, flows from south to north, and
often the ice, in the spring, breaks up in the middle of the course of
the river, before it gets thawed in Holland. The broken ice, in coming
down the stream towards the north, is kept within the banks of the
stream where the banks are high; but whe