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Updated: June 3, 2025
As they were thus discoursing, they discovered some thirty or forty windmills that are in that plain; and as soon as the knight had spied them, "Fortune," cried he, "directs our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished: look yonder, friend Sancho, there are at least thirty outrageous giants, whom I intend to encounter; and having deprived them of life, we will begin to enrich ourselves with their spoils; for they are lawful prize; and the extirpation of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to Heaven."
Then said the man, "I know not what is driving the windmills, not a breath of air is stirring," and he went onwards with his servants, and when they had walked two miles they saw a man sitting on a tree who was shutting one nostril, and blowing out of the other. "Good gracious! what are you doing up there?"
They disclose picturesque scenery, and the railways from London wind through their valleys and dart into the tunnels under their hills, whose tops disclose the gyrating sails of an army of windmills, while over their slopes roam the flocks of well-tended sheep that ultimately become the the much-prized South Down mutton.
The sea was kept out by a magnificent system of dykes under the daily superintendence of a board of officers, called dyke-graves, while the rain-water, which might otherwise have drowned the soil thus painfully reclaimed, was pumped up by windmills and drained off through sluices opening and closing with the movement of the tides. The province of Zeeland was one vast "polder."
For this purpose windmills are erected on the dike, as you see them in every direction, many of which work water-wheels, pumps being but seldom used. The apparatus for removing the water is of several kinds, including a scoop-wheel, the screw of Archimedes, and the inclined scoop-wheel. The water is not lifted to any considerable height by these instruments.
The red painted windmills flew like great birds in the air, though some of the habitans kept to their little home hand mill, whose two revolving stones needed a great expenditure of strength and ground but coarsely. You saw women spinning in doorways that they might nod to passers-by or chat with a neighbor who had time to spare. The children played about largely on the outside of the palisade.
By Frances Browne Once upon a time there stood far away in the west country a town called Stumpinghame. It contained seven windmills, a royal palace, a market place, and a prison, with every other convenience befitting the capital of a kingdom. A capital city was Stumpinghame, and its inhabitants thought it the only one in the world.
Here was a deserted city, with jungle creeping over Dutch waterways and red-brick houses, whose quaint gables and leaded windows spoke of eighteenth-century Holland rather than of twentieth-century Java. One involuntarily looked for windmills.
They were baffled by an unforeseen inundation; and when they were compelled to evacuate the flooded country, the Dutch quietly closed their dykes and pumped the water out again into their canals by their windmills, and again restored fertility to their fields; and by the time Louis was prepared for fresh invasions, a combination existed against him so formidable that he found it politic to make peace.
Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has submerged the earth.
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