Jan. 19.
Sympathy with the Dutch pcople in their many trials cannot fail to be world wide. Ninety nine out of every hundred British people will, on hearing of the bursting of the dykes, recall an jold story of their childhood, a land than with ourselves, which tells how a Dutch boy once saved the country by thrusting his arm into a leak in a dyke, thus stopping the water till he was found and effective repairs could be made. Here in Shanghai we are able to sppreciste the dangers lurking in low lands. A walk along the sea-wall anywhere between Woosung and Chapoo for example, or a view of the incoming bore in the Hangchow Bay, will provide food for thought respecting the vital value of dykes. Or again, a view from the top of the highest Chapoo hills over the broad expanse of the South i portion of the Yangtze delta will supply ample material for s comparison between the difficulties of polder-making and polder preservation in Holland and in China. Folk-lore under such conditions is sure to have many points in common. Amongst the Chinese farmers one of the essential factors in household happiness is to be dry. Everybody believes that in the spirit world one of the most common place of social questions is. "Do you sleep dry?" a query which sufficiently explains grave-mounds and other burial contrivances seen at our doors. For the dead, therefore, as well as for the living, the necessity of holding at bay the great liquid enemy is never lost sight of for a moment.
The Netherlands' one of the most glorious and sublime of all histories, is full of references to the ebb and flow in the conflict between man and his ever present and pressing friend or enemy, the sea. The vast morass of the Netherlands, nothing more than the delta of the Rhine and other streams in the neighbourhood, people of @ courage, an was early taken in hand
industry, and a tenacity of purpose unsurpassed, and ite development in the Middle Ages may be imagined when it is remembered that while in the tenth and following centuries the marsh was becoming " pasture and the morass a garden or orchard, in the fifteenth century the country was 80 fully developed as to be the proud possessor of from two to three hundred walled cities.
Riches then, unfortunately, bad the same dangerously attractive power that they have now, and the history of the sixteenth century contains for the Netherlands perhaps more stirring episodes than any other country can show story less widely known in Hol-within a similar cen Reuter
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.