Hans Brinker/Silver Skates/etc | Page 8

If we Americans,
who after all are homeopathic preparations of Holland stock, can laugh
at the Dutch, and call them human beavers and hint that their country
may float off any day at high tide, we can also feel proud, and say they
have proved themselves heroes and that their country will not float off
while there is a Dutchman left to grapple it.
There are said to be at least ninety-nine hundred large windmills in
Holland, with sails ranging from eighty to one hundred and twenty feet
long. They are employed in sawing timber, beating hemp, grinding, and
many other kinds of work; but their principal use is for pumping water
from the lowlands into the canals, and for guarding against the inland
freshets that so often deluge the country. Their yearly cost is said to be
nearly ten million dollars. The large ones are of great power. The huge
circular tower, rising sometimes from the midst of factory buildings, is
surmounted with a smaller one tapering into a caplike roof. This upper
tower is encircled at its base with a balcony, high above which juts the
axis turned by its four prodigious ladder-back sails.
Many of the windmills are primitive affairs, seeming sadly in need of
Yankee "improvements," but some of the new ones are admirable.
They are constructed so that by some ingenious contrivance they
present their fans, or wings, to the wind in precisely the right direction
to work with the requisite power. In other words, the miller may take a
nap and feel quite sure that his mill will study the wind and make the
most of it, until he wakens. Should there be but a slight current of air,
every sail will spread itself to catch the faintest breath, but if a heavy
"blow" should come, they will shrink at its touch, like great mimosa
leaves, and only give it half a chance to move them.
One of the old prisons of Amsterdam, called the Rasphouse, because
the thieves and vagrants who were confined there were employed in
rasping logwood, had a cell for the punishment of lazy prisoners. In one
corner of this cell was a pump, and in another, an opening through
which a steady stream of water was admitted. The prisoner could take
his choice, either to stand still and be drowned or to work for dear life
at the pump and keep the flood down until his jailer chose to relieve

him. Now it seems to me that, throughout Holland, nature has
introduced this little diversion on a grand scale. The Dutch have always
been forced to pump for their very existence and probably must
continue to do so to the end of time.
Every year millions of dollars are spent in repairing dikes and
regulating water levels. If these important duties were neglected, the
country would be uninhabitable. Already dreadful consequences, as I
have said, have followed the bursting of these dikes. Hundreds of
villages and towns have from time to time been buried beneath the rush
of waters, and nearly a million persons have been destroyed. One of the
most fearful inundations ever known occurred in the autumn of the year
1570. Twenty-eight terrible floods had before that time overwhelmed
portions of Holland, but this was the most terrible of all. The unhappy
country had long been suffering under Spanish tyranny; now, it seemed,
the crowning point was given to its troubles. When we read Motley's
history of the rise of the Dutch republic, we learn to revere the brave
people who have endured, suffered, and dared so much.
Mr. Motley, in his thrilling account of the great inundation, tells us how
a long-continued and violent gale had been sweeping the Atlantic
waters into the North Sea, piling them against the coasts of the Dutch
provinces; how the dikes, taxed beyond their strength, burst in all
directions; how even the Hand-bos, a bulwark formed of oaken piles,
braced with iron, moored with heavy anchors, and secured by gravel
and granite, was snapped to pieces like thread; how fishing boats and
bulky vessels floating up into the country became entangled among the
trees or beat in the roofs and walls of dwellings, and how, at last, all
Friesland was converted into an angry sea. "Multitudes of men, women,
children, of horses, oxen, sheep, and every domestic animal, were
struggling in the waves in every direction. Every boat and every article
which could serve as a boat was eagerly seized upon. Every house was
inundated; even the graveyards gave up their dead. The living infant in
his cradle and the long-buried corpse in his coffin floated side by side.
The ancient flood seemed about to be renewed. Everywhere, upon the
tops of trees, upon the steeples of churches, human beings were