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At Halfweg, a little cluster of humble dwellings, I turned out of the main canal, skirting the side of the Haarlemmer-meer Polder, opposite to that which we had followed yesterday. "When is the surprise coming?" asked Phyllis at last, her curiosity piqued by the slowness of progress in this small canal.
Miss Van Buren whom I think of as "Nell" knew all this, including the very day in 1840 when the work was begun, and how many months the pumps had taken to drink the monstrous cup dry; but the mysterious little lady who rules us all, and is ruled by Tibe, expected to find the Haarlemmer-meer still a lake, and was disappointed to learn the meaning of "polder."
The others are frankly ignorant; but the Chaperon has read a book of Rider Haggard's called "Lysbeth," and was deeply interested in the Haarlemmer-meer, where the "treasure" of that story lay hid; but it was news to her that the great inland sea had once sent a destructive flood to the gates of Amsterdam, and that as punishment it had been drained away.
The Dutch, pursuing their steady course of reclamation, have just added some hundreds of acres to their territory on the borders of the Scheldt; and it is said that the grand enterprise of draining the Haarlemmer-Meer is at last completed, there being nothing now left but a small running stream across the lowest part of the basin.
However, as Starr remarked sagely, we can stop in port for wind and wave, and be very happy. As we talked, down on a page of my note-book went a roughly sketched map of Holland, my idea being to begin with Gouda, going on to Leiden, slipping through the villages of South Holland, which seem strange to travelers, and skirting the great polder that was once the famed Haarlemmer-Meer.
I did my best yesterday, in talking of Haarlem, to awaken interest in the huge Haarlemmer-meer Polder, and its importance in the modern scheme of the Netherlands. Now my eloquence was rewarded, for they hurried through their luncheon, not that they might cheer the skipper's loneliness, but that they might miss no feature in the landscape.
We were teuf-teufing comfortably along a modest canal, leading us southward, and Alb was explaining to the L.C.P. and the van Buren girls that, to reach Rotterdam by the shortest way, he meant to avoid the places we had seen: Aalsmeer, with its menagerie of little tree-animals, and the great Haarlemmer-meer Polder.
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