Waiting alongside the dock station at Enkhuizen will be the side-wheel steamer that ferries the passengers the fourteen miles across the Zuyder Zee to Stavoren in Friesland. The old Dromedary Tower, as they call it, at the harbor, diminishes rapidly into the general skyline of Enkhuizen, and you will be sailing out over what was once a broad isthmus of dry land--for the Zuyder Zee was not always the Zuyder Zee. Until the thirteenth century it consisted of but a comparatively small inland lake called Flevo. Near the close of that cycle--in 1282, to give the exact year--the German ocean burst over the land from the north, wiping the lives of 80,000 people out of existence and combining itself and Lake Flevo into one, which was henceforth called the Zuyder Zee. Above the ferry crossing, beginning at the eastern end of the little island of Wieringen, they will build the contemplated dam across it, the first process in the reclamation of more than a million acres of what was once a fertile, productive district. In pleasant weather it is a beautiful trip across the neck of the Zee, but if the breeze blows from the north, bringing with it the customary cold drizzle of rain, the best method of putting in the time is to go below to the cabin and follow the invariable custom of the country of eating bread and great, thin slices of Dutch cheese. Stavoren is the deadest of all the “dead cities of the Zuyder Zee.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century the merchants of Stavoren were prepotent among the rulers of the world of trade and commerce. Treasures from all the then known corners of the earth lay in their storehouses. The homes of these merchant princes were palaces comparable only with those of kings and furnished with the sumptuousness and incomputable grandeur of the famous abodes of the Sultan Harun-al-Rashid in the “Arabian Nights.” Previously, Stavoren had been the residence of all the Frisian princes. But riches contributed to the pride that came before its fall. To-day the census taker counts its population in three figures and its commerce is not worthy of mention in a trade report. The smoke of the lingering express train that will subsequently carry you to Friesland’s capital is the only evidence that the town may not be abandoned completely. As you sail into the harbor, a wide, grass-grown embankment in front of the town can be seen plainly from the steamer’s deck. This is the Vrouwensand, and it recalls the legend that attributes the fall of Stavoren to the whims of a woman. The reader himself must be the judge whether or not the tale is worth the telling. One writer on Holland asserts that no author dealing previously with the country in a literary way has been gifted either with the independence or the imprudence to avoid it. His predecessors have been numerous and illustrious, and if the story be so important that each of them has seen fit to relate it, I can do naught but imitate.