The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-02-08

many have no other homes. We ire
 quently saw children trotting up and
 down the roofs of the barges within six
 inches of drowning, and now and then
 a little one tied with rope to the mast
 On many of the boats the women were
 cooking; on some they were hanging out
 the washing, and on one little Dutch
 girl held up her doll baby and laughed
 as we went by.
 Every village along the canal had its own boats tied to the banks and the lar
 ger towns were cut up by canals so that boats from the main canals could be | taken into them by means of locks We stopped for a time at Dordrecht,
 which in the middle ages was one of the
 richest of all the Dutch cities. It had palaces at that time and its buildings | now are medieaval and quaint to an ex-
 treme. Just below the city there is a | lumber yard at which barges of American | lumber were unloading. l noted the name | of the firm. It was Dubbledam, an eyi- dence that the lumber men of Holland
 can compete in profanity with our men at home.
 In many places along these canals there were dredges at work, and here and there We saw the officers of the Waterstaat experimenting the building of new em- 1 Eankments. The canals are almost every | where walled with stones, the size of your two fists. and as 1 looked at them the enormous work that 1t must have taken to make 1000 miles of such canals came
 to mo. There are no stones in Holland. Every pebble has tO be brought in from other countries. and every one of those
 stones was laid by hand. Every one took
 a part of mIns life to put it in its ] place, so that in reality the lives of gen erations have been swallowed up by these canal banks.
 W1ndmilis on the Wane You have all heard of the windmiIs ct Holland? They are to be seen every where. Along some of the canals there are hundreds of them. They spot the farms, and you see them on the edge of
 the towns, where they grind flour, saw lumber and do all sorts of things They give great charm 10 the landsca pc They look SD alive that l don't wonder that Don Qu.Xotc took one for giant
 and wanted to fight him. These mills are all old and it must have cost many mil lions of dollars to build them. Their day, | however is past and but few new ones are building. The gas engine and the steam engine have taken their places. and we may yet have a Holland without windmills.
 Hollands Ship Canals. Holland has made it's ship canals pay
 well. Amsterdam has the North Sea Ca
 nal, which is about fifteen miles long, run
 ming across the country from Amsterdam
 to the ocean. It is thirty feet deep and has two enormous locks which protect it | from the North Sea at high tide l took
 a ride along it a week ago and inspected | the oreakwaters at its entrance. The work Is we'll done, but the locks do not | compare with those of the Sault Ste. Ma
 rie, between Lake Superior and Lake Iiu- ron. The canal cost about $16 0O0 900, of which one-fourth was paid by the sale of l the reclaimed land, which brought an av- craze price of almost $500 an acre. Rotterdam.
 This town of Rotterdam is a city of ca | nals and canalized rivers. The Maas has been so dredged that it now permits the
 largest of ocean steamship to come intq | Rotterdam, and the connections with tHe Rhine and other parts of Europe are such | that this city has become one of the chief ports on the continent. It is one l of our principal gat-ways for Northern Europe, sUrpasSjnE Antwerp in its impor- tauonS of American products, Antwerp. | as far as the figures go, has the greater tonnage but much uf it's tonnage is made up of ships which merely touch there,