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The sea is higher than the land, the lowest ground in the country being from twenty-four to thirty feet below high-water mark. The keel of the Young America, floating in some of the waters of Holland, would be higher than the ridge-pole of the Dutchman's cottage on the other side of the dike. "These low grounds, formerly swamps and lagoons, which lie below the sea level, are called polders.
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.
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.
After walking on for about a quarter of a mile, the commissioner said that he would show them the interior of one of the dairy houses, where the cheeses were made, for the business of this town was the making of cheeses from the milk of the cows that feed on the green polders that lie all around them.
"The polders all have drains and canals cut in them. As we ride along in the railway carriages we overlook these polders. They look like immense green fields, extending as far as you can see, with straight canals running through them in every direction, and crossing each other at right angles. These canals, in the bottom of the polders, are about six feet wide.
Three great provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and sustained a dense industrious population.
The substitution of steam-engines for the feeble and uncertain action of windmills, in driving pumps, has much facilitated the removal of water from the polders as well as the draining of lakes, marshes, and shallow bays, and thus given such an impulse to these enterprises, that not less than one hundred and ten thousand acres wore reclaimed from the waters, and added to the agricultural domain of the Netherlands, between 1815 and 1855.
Nevertheless, he had no intention of relinquishing a habit of years for the Polders, or the north end of the city; and when, later, he came down into the hall, where the man stood with his silk hat and cape, Mariana put an arm about his shoulders. "I wish every one could he as beautiful as yourself," she told him.
In the polders or hollow places below the sea, and saved from destruction only by the dikes, is some of the richest and most productive land in Europe. Here prospered a teeming and industrious population. Agriculture, the parent of national prosperity, flourished as nowhere else. Manufactures and trade had followed in its train, until the hollow lands had become the beehive of Europe.
Hundreds of houses in Bruges remained empty, Ypres was half destroyed, and Ghent had lost a considerable part of its population. Civil war had exhausted the country's resources during the last years of the fourteenth century. In the country-side the dykes were neglected, great stretches of "polders" were again flooded by the sea, and wolves and bears infested the woods.
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