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It arose on the summit of a precipitous rock, which descends on the princely river, there rendered peculiarly remarkable by the cataract called Campsie Linn, where its waters rush tumultuously over a range of basaltic rock, which intercepts the current, like a dike erected by human hands.
The main body of the King's troops were committed to the lead of Walpole, who had also two six-pounders and a howitzer. The sides of the pass were lined with a bushy shrubbery, and the roadway at the bottom embanked with ditch and dike. On came the confident Walpole, never dreaming that these silent thickets were so soon to re-echo the cries of the onslaught.
Speaking of that very dike of West Kappel," added the professor, pointing to its long, inclined escarpment, "it is said if it had been originally built of solid copper, the prime cost would have been less than the amount which has since been expended upon it in building, rebuilding, restoring, and repairing it. But the money spent on dikes is the salvation of Holland.
Colonel Colt bought this meadow for a nominal sum, and, to the astonishment of the good people of Hartford, proceeded to surround it with a strong dike, or embankment. This embankment was two miles in length, one hundred and fifty feet wide at the base, from thirty to sixty feet wide at the top, and from ten to twenty-five feet high.
That means that Great Britain has torn down the dike which has protected West Europe and its culture from the desert sands of the Asiatic barbarism of Russia and of Pan-Slavism. Now we Germans are forced to stop up the breach with our bodies. We shall do it amid streams of blood, and we shall hold out there.
However, the case was a serious one, and after giving it due reflection I determined to wait on the dike on the following morning. "As the duke gives audience to the first comer," I said to myself, "why should I not have as good a reception as a labouring man?"
His iron shoes were clicking along the macadam of the dike.
No dike stood whole except one that the farmer, unaided, had built in a straight line from the road to the top of Mount Bare, and my own, the further end of which dipped in water. Of the plot of firs planted fifty years earlier to help on Waster Lunny's crops, only a triangle had withstood the night.
About halfway across the heath there had been a wide dike recently cut, and the earth from the cutting was cast up roughly on the other side. Surely this would stop them! But no; with scarcely a pause Lizzie took the leap, stumbled among the rough clods and fell. Blantyre groaned, "Now, Auster, do your best!" He gave me a steady rein.
So long as the dunes are maintained by nature or by human art, they serve, like any other embankment or dike, as a partial or a complete protection against the encroachments of the sea; and on the other hand, when their drifts are not checked by natural processes, or by the industry of man, they become a cause of as certain, if not of as sudden, destruction as the ocean itself whose advance they retard.
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