What wonder that the Dutchman should regard with fascination a project that would expel these murky. waters and revive the dead cities and villages: that slumber beneath them? Driving along the dyke in the neighbourhood of Hoorn a Dutch gentleman showed me a rich stretch of fertile Jand dotted as usual with thatched windmills, and lying nine feet below the level igh water. '*When the tide reaches that figure," said he, pointing to one of the hydrometrical posts corresponding with the water measurements of Amsterdam ile, still we are not afraid, but we hot laugh." To a foreigner, suffering from an_uneasy sense of being on board a water-logyed ship, the wonder is.that the Dutchman ever laughs at all. - By pumping off the Zuyder Zee Mynheer Vanduncke would get the water out of his hold, so to speak. He would rid himself of hundreds of miles of costly embankments, and ho would have. the satisfaction of knowing that an enemy more troublesome than the Spaniard, though still thundering at his ocean ramparts, had at all events been expelled from occupation of his richest provinees.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.