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So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots- Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men.
So Berendrecht, as vigilant and devoted as even Peter Gieselles had ever been, now succeeded to the care of the Polders and the Porcupines, and the Hell's Mouths; and all the other forts, whose quaint designations had served, as usually is the case among soldiers, to amuse the honest patriots in the midst of their toils and danger.
The battle of liberty against despotism was now fought in the hop-fields of Brabant or the polders of Friesland, now in the narrow seas which encircle England, and now on the sunny plains of Dauphiny, among the craggy inlets of Brittany, or along the high roads and rivers which lead to the gates of Paris.
"The water that collects in these low canals and drains, which run across the polders, cannot flow out into the large canals, which are higher than they are, and so they have to pump it out. They pump it out generally by means of wind mills. So wherever you go, throughout all Holland, you find an immense number of wind mills. These wind mills are very curious indeed.
On the coast of Zeeland and the islands of South Holland, the tides, and of course the surface of the lands deposited by them, are so high that the polders can be drained by ditching and sluices, but at other points, as in the enclosed grounds of North Holland on the Zuiderzee, where the tide rises but three feet or even less, pumping is necessary from the beginning.
The sunlight fell perpendicularly upon its smooth waters, and made them flash and sparkle until the eye was weary; in other places, the gray waters lay stagnant amid the gray sands, or else were of the dead white of tin. It would have been easy to believe one's self in the Holland Polders, travelling along one of the sleepy inland seas.
The polders of the Netherland coast are of this character, and the meadows in Lincolnshire, which have been covered with slime by warping, as it is called, or admitting water over them at high tide, are remarkably productive.
When the tide is low in the sea, the surplus water from these rivers and canals flows off through immense sluices at the mouth of them. When the tide comes up, it is kept from flowing in by immense gates, with which the sluices are closed. They call the tracts of land that lie lower than the channels of water around them, polders. That is rather a queer name. I suppose it is a Dutch name.
A portion of the land, which seemed to have been forever lost, was regained; but at the cost of what determined strife, after how many battles, with what dire alternations! Within a century, three entire polders on the north coast of Noordbeveland have again vanished, and in the place where they were there flows a stream forty yards deep.
Obviously again, if his railway-ring meant anything, an attack by invasion on that remote and desolate littoral which he had so often himself declared to be impregnably secure behind its web of sands and shallows. My mind went back to my question at Bensersiel, 'Can this coast be invaded? to his denial and our fruitless survey of the dykes and polders.
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