6 THE LAND OF PLUCK

upon the very land of their birth. They have had to push
back the ocean to prevent it from rolling in upon them.
They have had to wall in the rivers and lakes to keep
them within bounds. They have been forced to decide

 

which should be land and which should be water,
forever digging, building, embanking, and pumping for
dear existence. They had no stones, no timber, that
they had not themselves procured from elsewhere.
Added to this, they have had the loose, blowing sand
in their mind’s eye for ages; never forgetting it, gov-
erning its drifts, and where its vast, silent heapings (as
in the great dunes along the coast) have proved use-
ful as a protection, they have planted sea-bent and
other vegetation to fasten it in its place. Even the riotous
wind has been made their slave. Caught by thousands of
long-armed windmills, it does their grinding, pumping,
draining, sawing. When it ceases to blow, those great
white sleeve-like sails all over the country hang limp and
listless in the misty air, or are tucked trimly out of sight ;
but let the first breath of a gale be felt, and straightway,
with one flutter of preparation, every arm is turning slowly,
steadily, with a peculiar plenty-of-time air, or is whirling
as if the spirit of seventy Dutchmen had taken posses-
sion of it.

You scarcely can stand anywhere in Holland without
seeing from one to twenty windmills. Many of them are
built in the form of a two-story tower, the second story
being smaller than the first, with a balcony at its base
from which it tapers upward until the cap-like top is
reached. High up, near the roof, the great axis juts from