Fayette County herald. [volume] (Washington [Washington Court House], Fayette County, O. [Ohio]) 1860-1???, 1879-04-24
a Queer Little Country.
National Repository for April.

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National Repository for April
holland Is country noEiceably ssman-
abounding," as Aristophanes saws of
Greece, and yet without either the maias-
| ty of grandeur or the beauty of romance.
Its surface, which you can survey almost
in its entirety from the towers of one of
its churches, presents perfectly fat,rie
and cheerful scene-cheerful despite its
supreme repose. There are frequent viii
lagos, each with its church tower or spire,
on all parts of the horizon, and each gen
erBlly more or less clothed with wood,
The various canals everywhere intersect-
ing the plain are often lined with poplars
and willows. The perpetual breeze turns
innumeral windmills, which grind grain
or saw timber or regulate the canals. Adj +,
vancing through a prosperous, busy life
of this kind, you pass many dairy farms
and much rich pasture land dotted with
groups of cattle. There is plenty of color
and homely ornament in the villages you
enter, and an indedendent quaintness
about the shape and style Of each house,
as if each house was conscious that its
independence had been too hard fought
for not to be worth maintaining in every
detail. Then there is a great love of flow
ers visible, developing itself often in huge
and brilliant hollyhocks, or "stickroses,"
as the natives call them.
In the towns, the piquancy of water
life goin on inside a town-life is the crown
ing novelty to the stranger. The canals
run through the bodies of the chief cities,
like Yanes in the human body, and their
green blood gives it strange animation.
Masts rise beside the trees by which the
canals are lined, opposite windows with
outside shutters of green, or lined with
flowers, belonging to houses in which the
prevailing red is varied by different
shapes of that warm color, and by artfuI
zebra-like stripes of white, which seem
always to be kept clean and fresh. Out
side every window are little mirrors,
which present to the person sitting inside
the whole line of the street, and into
which the ladies look as they sit plying
their needles, with the constancy of the
Lady of Shalott. Barges of many colors
push steadily along the canals; the white
bridges open heavily to let the constant
traffic pass, and no sooner do they close
again than carts and trucks and hand
borrows go rattling over them. Every
body is busy; yet so much of the heavy
work is done by water that there is COM
parative little noise.
Looking about you in the streets you
notice fruit shops where the melons look
blooming and luscious, and cigar shops
where the cigars are both cheap and good
and cheese shops with cheese as round as
cannon balls; and you discover that
painted pole does not indicate a barber's
room, but a provision store, and that the
barber makes his presence known by
hanging out three basins. And how tram
quilly the city reposes on its canals, with
a belt of water winding round it! Yet, a.
northwest wind, for two successive tides,
floods the town. What was street yes
terday becomes river; and you pass in
a boat over the spot last occupied by your
child's perambulator. Women skurry off,
holding up their peticoats; heavy gentle
men are carried into dry regions by por-
ters. The doors and ground-fioor win
dows are closed, secured and made i'm
penetrable to wet, by processes founded
on old experience, and the householder
walks up stairs and halls in his drawing
room terra .E,neal How do the houses
stand the strain? Because the founda-
tions, though often as much as six hun
dred years old, are seventy feet deepI-
They consist of piles sunk through the
mud into the clay, and upon them stout
platform of planks; and the whole of the
wood work being constantly covered with
water, this foundation once laid serves
for successive houses, and seems to be al
most indestructible. Upon the platform
is raised the house, with very strong walls
of stone or clinker brick, tied together so
firmly with numerous transverse beams,
that at the top of a merchants house, seven
or eight stories high, may often be found
warehouse containing the heaviest iron
goods.