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Howat Penny arrived in town late on the day when he was to dine with Mariana at the Polders. He entered a taxicab, and was carried smoothly through the thick, hot air; open electric cars, ladened with damp, pallid salespeople, passed with a harsh ringing; and the foliage in Rittenhouse Square hung dusty and limp and still.
But we are ignorant of the proportions in which the marine deposits that form the soil of the polders have been derived from materials brought down by these rivers, or from other more remote sources.
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.
As a result of ruthless flooding of the country, ten of the fifteen miles between Leyden and the outer dyke were easily passed; but five miles from the city ran the Landscheidung or inner dyke, which was above water, and beyond this an intricate system of canals and flooded polders, with forts and villages held by a Spanish force four times as strong.
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.
At the beginning of the Burgundian régime, under Philip the Bold, Flanders was partially ruined by internal and external wars. Its towns were depleted of their craftsmen, its polders converted into marshes by the incursions of the sea, and wolves and wild boars again wandered through the country as in the early Middle Ages.
"We will suppose that the dike we have built around Ysselmonde protects it from the exterior water; but as the water in the Maas, at high tide, or even at low tide, is above the surface of the polders, they cannot be drained by the ordinary ditches; and it is necessary to remove the water by mechanical means.
Under Charlemagne, it had already become their principal industry. In the eleventh century, with the conquest of new "polders" upon the sea and the extension of the area of rich low meadows, the quantity of wool increased considerably, and, more raw material becoming available, the cloth industry developed accordingly.
Out in the country at large, in any of the eleven provinces, whenever they drained a swamp, or pumped out a pond to make a village, it was not looked upon as a part of Holland, unless there were storks. Even in the new wild places they planted stakes on the pumped out dry land, called polders.
Instead of green country lanes, green canals stretch from field to barn and from barn to garden; and the farms, or polders, as they are termed, are merely great lakes pumped dry. Some of the busiest streets are water, while many of the country roads are paved with brick.
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