The surface of the territory to the eastward of the imaginary longitude is barely scratched by the searcher of the picturesque and historical. Many of its towns are as interesting as any of those in the west, but, as a general rule, their peoples have been more easily influenced by German and Belgian methods, and, therefore, their characteristics differ greatly from those of the natives of North and South Holland and Zeeland, for example. What evidences of their history and art these towns still possess they have in a great measure failed to appreciate themselves, and it is this lack of self-confidence, translated into a complete failure so far to advertise their own scenic and historical virtues, that has bred the comparative aloofness with respect to them in the manner of the tourist through Holland. Probably the majority of travelers go to the Netherlands, not for art, nor for scenery, nor even for history, but for windmills and wooden shoes (to epitomize the characteristics of the country and its peoples), and for that reason their wanderings are bound to be confined, for the most part, to the exiguous territory bordered by the North Sea on the west and the Zuyder Zee on the east. The omnipresent story of Holland is the story of its fight against the waters. Its other conquests pale before it. Its eighty years’ revolution against the Spaniards cannot compare with it. Water is Holland’s perpetual and merciless enemy; so much so that if all the dikes that protect her from the waters of the ocean burst to-night, to-morrow there would be but a third of the country left. How she has conquered would fill a book in itself. Since the Frisian monks first commenced to dike in the country, successive inundations have blotted out the lives of more of her people than all her conquests at arms put together. But still the Dutch fought on, resolutely, unflinchingly, persistently, until they dredged what land they needed from the bottom of the sea and grew grass and flowers and vegetables where kelp and cockle-shells thrived before. After hundreds of years of dredging and diking, by 1833 Holland had attained an acreage of 8,768 square miles. By 1877 she had added another four thousand. Characteristic of the Dutch perseverance to conquer the menacing waters is a part of the report of the commission appointed to superintend the reclamation of the Haarlemermeer, an inland sea that once lapped the very gates of Amsterdam herself and upon which a fleet of seventy vessels once gave battle. “We have driven forever from the bosom of our country a most dangerous enemy,” said the commission, after its task had been completed; “we have at the same time augmented the means for defending our capital in time of war. We have conquered a province in combat without tears and without blood, where science and genius took the place of generals, and where workmen were the worthy soldiers.”