FIFTH READING BOOK. A COUNTRY BELOW THE SEA. 1. PRAY don't laugh; I have been in it, and came back dry-shod. Moreover, there are cities and towns, with their houses and churches, and there are fields and meadows, with their crops and cattle, in this strange country, and tens of thousands of happy and hearty men, women, and children! 2. The name of this extraordinary place is Holland— that is," the Hollow Land,” and it has this name because a great part of it really lies below the level of the ocean which washes its borders. It forms part of the district known, also, as "the Nether Lands," or the lands below those round them, so that the very name it bears shows that it has always been known for the same strange characteristic. 3. Holland and the neighbouring little kingdom of Belgium are, in fact, nothing but the gradual silting up of the former shallow edge of the German Ocean, by the mud brought down, through ages, by the three rivers— the Rhine,1 the Meuse, and the Scheldt.3 Filling up, in the end, the spaces between the sandbanks at the ancient mouths of these streams, it had, before the age of Cæsar,* raised a delta" of wide morasses, oozy islands, and savage forests, to which the bravest of the Belgic tribes, the Nervii, betook themselves, for safety against all enemies. 4. This watery home has been finally wrested from the ocean and from the rivers by the indefatigable industry of its inhabitants. The whole line of sea coast and of river bank has been lined with great dykes of earth, which look to a stranger like common roads, and indeed are used as such. But they have been gradually THE TOWN OF DORT. |