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He, too, meeting Mariana's eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat Penny. And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year! Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders' depressing house, the odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes. The precipitant, prideful, young fool!
Under the supervision of the monks and of the stewards of dukes and counts, who soon realized the advantages of the Cistercian method, they created new "polders" along the Flemish coast, cleared the forests of Hainault and Namur, and reclaimed the heaths and marshes of Flanders and Brabant.
His land after draining is full of the stuff for which he otherwise would pay thousands and thousands of dollars. Phosphates and lime form the coverings of minute swamp life and nitrogen compounds are a part of their bodies. The polders of Holland are not richer than this swamp land; indeed, they are not so rich.
The streets are closely built up for many miles along the canal, but the town does not extend laterally at all, on account of the ground falling off immediately to very low polders. After entering the street the commissioner left the carriage, in order that the horses might rest, and led Mr. George and Rollo on a walk through the prettiest part of the town.
Peat was not only the fuel for the fireside, but for the extensive fabrics of the country, and its advantages so much excited the admiration of the Venetian envoys that they sent home samples of it, in the hope that the lagunes of Venice might prove as prolific of this indispensable article as the polders of Holland.
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 eminent geologist Staring, however, who briefly refers to the subject in De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 356 et seqq., does not consider the evidence sufficient to prove anything more than the sinking of the surface of the polders from drying and consolidation.
Thus he says, with a glow of satisfaction, 'I possess an aviary and a garden, like my cousin Hans on the polders, although my home is on the moving waters. To strengthen the illusion what does he do but fix a toy gate on the poop above his sleeping-cabin, and thus cherishes the belief that he is on his own domain?
The sea-dyke saves Holland from the Northern Ocean, sombre and grey in its most genial mood, menacing and stormy for the long winter of our northern hemisphere; but it is to the inland dykes that protect the low-lying polders that Holland owes her prosperity and the sources of wealth which have made her inhabitants a nation.
The other suddenly recalled Mariana's imploring anger at the Polders. "Don't be so rotten, Howat." The confusion of his valuations, his habitual attitudes of thought, returned. His gaze strayed to the obscured ruin of Shadrach Furnace, at once a monument of departed vigour and present disintegration. Perhaps, just as the energy had expired in the Furnace, it had seeped from him.
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