It is in the North Sea Canal that Amsterdam places her only hope of ever being able to compete with Rotterdam as a shipping port. With its fifteen miles of length, its sixty-five to one hundred and ten yards of width, and its thirty feet of depth, this canal pierces the one-time peninsula of North Holland from the Zuyder Zee to its western boundary, making an island out of part of the province and placing Amsterdam in direct and easy communication with the North Sea. An “A.P.” gauge along its bank would prove its water level to be about twenty inches minus, that is, twenty inches below the mean level of the water at Amsterdam--the bench mark of all water levels throughout Holland. To cut such a canal across country from one sea to another and to protect it at either end with immense breakwaters and lock gates has cost the government in the neighborhood of $18,000,000 and consumed eleven years of patient labor. Since 1895 its western terminus has been divided into two outlets, the older being protected by a lock of three openings, while the more recently completed branch, diverging a little to the northward from the main canal, has but one opening, 245 yards long, 27 yards wide, and 33 feet deep. Zaandam being the home and breeding ground of the windmill, a bird’s-eye view of it would give the effect of four inverted centipedes kicking in their death throes. It is the center of the Dutch lumber trade, and since the windmill is the cheapest method of generating the power that any lumber trade requires in order to operate its sawmills, Zaandam draws from the breeze what we conjure from steam. There are upwards of four hundred windmills in its immediate vicinity. Its houses, brightly painted with green, red, or white, and surrounded with pleasant little gardens, gayly reiterate the Dutchman’s delight in contrasts, harmonious or otherwise. Another of Zaandam’s claims to the consideration of the tourist is a little old house near the harbor, that belongs, not to any resident of the town, nor to any man in Holland, but to the Czar of all the Russias personally. It is the house which Peter the Great made his domestic headquarters for a brief week in the year 1697 while, as tradition has it, he studied shipbuilding incognito in Zaandam. If the villagers had not made themselves so pestiferously inquisitive and penetrated his disguise a few days after his arrival he might have learned a lot from Mynheer Kalf, under whose competent tutelage he apprenticed himself as a ship carpenter; but the idlers about town became too importunate for Peter. He gave up his position at the end of a week and returned to Amsterdam.