Disembarking from the train, you will turn instinctively to the north through a wide avenue--a veritable tunnel through the trees. After crossing the drawbridge that spans the canal at the end of the avenue, you must turn abruptly to the left. The first cross street--little more than an alleyway between the houses--is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. A flight of thirty-one steps ascends to the top of this peculiar embankment and you scramble up, expecting to behold on the other side a view of--you scarcely know what. You are surprised to discover that the view is a sea-scape, for, if you have failed to observe The Helder’s lofty lighthouse, it has not been suggested to you that the sea is anywhere in the neighborhood. You will be standing on the top of one of the greatest and strongest dikes in Holland, its business side stretching away before you at an angle of forty degrees for two hundred feet into the Strait of Marsdiep. Extending a total distance of five miles in the arc of a circle, this, then, is the sloping buttress that North Holland relies upon for its very life. A severe storm will lash the water of the strait into spray, and fling it across into the windows of the bordering houses, but the highest of tides cannot come over the backbone of the dike, while at all times the water laps restlessly at its foundations. The top of the dike is mounted with a roadway twelve feet in width. Some feet above the water line at low tide the tops of great stone breakwaters, like the ribs of a dinosaur, stretch seaward at regular intervals. The whole of this remarkable artificial coast is constructed of Norwegian granite. Upon the summits of a few sand dunes that raise themselves here and there behind the dike the Dutch have completed the construction of some rather crude military fortifications which Napoleon commenced in 1811. But improvements upon them are going on apace, for Holland is not exactly anxious to suffer an experience with regard to her string of islands in the north, in furthering German aggrandizement as did the Danes of Helgoland before the gun muzzles of the British in 1807. The single point of North Holland, however, most exposed to sea encroachments is a few miles south of The Helder on the North Sea. Here there is a chain of three great dikes, one beyond the other, named significantly, beginning with the one farthest from the shore, “The Waker,” “The Dreamer,” and “The Sleeper.” Still farther to the south, on the same side of the province, are the great sand dunes, three miles in width in some places, under the protection of which the freight boats from Amsterdam creep to their destinations along the North Sea Canal.