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Before us were two very small islands, mere handfuls of sand, lying side by side, and encompassed half by the open sea, half by stiller waters diked in by marshes and sand bars. A coarse, scanty grass and a few stunted trees with branches bending away from the sea lived upon them, but nothing else. Over them and over the marshes and the sand banks circled myriads of great white gulls.
The paper canoe had now entered the regions of the rice-planter. Along the low banks of the Peedee were diked marshes where, before the civil war, each estate produced from five thousand to forty thousand bushels of rice annually, and the lords of rice were more powerful than those of cotton, though cotton was king.
Marius, thoughtfully, and with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My mother? At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder. "Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic." That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow in his soul.
Large flat fields, imperfectly covered with coarse rank grass, and divided by the numerous branches of streams, all more or less diked to save the land from complete inundation, succeed.
I never saw such a time. I'm no good at telling a yarn, kid. It was something fierce. There was nothing but knots and knots; all diked up and tangles by the mile. And so I had to step in and straighten things out. And and so, kid, I told the major everything; every scrap of your history, as far as I knew it. All you had told to me. I had to. Now, don't tell me I kicked in. Say I did right, kid.
Carter. "This will be, in two or three years, anyway," answered Will, "for it will be deep marsh, alluvial to the bottom and permanently fertile." "And what do you suppose it ought to be worth next year, as soon as it's diked in?" asked Ted. "O," said Will, carelessly, "maybe a hundred and fifty, or ten better, perhaps!" "Dear boys," said Mrs.
"How many acres do you expect to reclaim?" she inquired, after praising Will's sagacity warmly. "Well," said Will, "of course we won't have it surveyed till the work's done and we are sure of the property; but I have an idea it will go a good ten acres, or maybe twelve." "And good diked land, or ma'sh as these people call it, is worth about two hundred dollars an acre, isn't it?" went on Mrs.
Fifty years ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile land. They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance of ten feet, to get through in time. Who could work the handle?
Not a year passes but some new and valuable product of the soil is naturalized in this State; and one who has seen the soil and who knows the climate of the two great valleys, who sees that within five, or, at most, ten years all their overflowed lands will be diked and reclaimed, and all their dry lands will be irrigated, and who has, besides, seen how wide is the range of products which the soil and climate yield, comes at last to have what seems to most Eastern people an exaggerated view of the future of California.
The eight principal branches and the hundred minor channels and outlets of the Delta, breaking up the land into a labyrinth of hundreds of islets, are then blended together in one watery surface, out of which only the crests of these islets emerge with isolated villages, with log-huts and long whitewashed buildings, and high-domed churches, all dammed and diked up like the town itself Tartar villages, Calmuck villages, Cossack villages, all or most of them fishers' homes and fishing establishments a population of 20,000 to 30,000 souls being thus scattered on the bare sand-hills and dunes; men of all race, colour, and faith, all employed in the same fishing pursuit; the Tartars and Calmucks usually as rank and file, the Russians and other Europeans as overseers, foremen, and skilled labourers.
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