Edmondo De Amicis

“ Beyond Meppel you enter the province of Over-Yssel, which for a certain distance presents much the same aspect as that of the Drenta-underbrush, peat swamps, and solitude; and you arrive in a short time at a village, if village it can be called, the strangest that the human mind can conceive. ”

“ In this singular village there are no cafés and no streets, because their ancestors had not the former, and for the latter there is no need, the houses being all planted in one long row. The inhabitants are all Calvinists, sober, austere, and laborious. The men knit their own stockings in the intervals of time when not occupied in the cultivation of the ground: and such is their abhorrence of idleness, that when they meet in council to deliberate upon the affairs of the village, each man brings his knitting, in order not to have his hands unoccupied during the discussion. ”

“ Exhausted peat-fields are converted into meadows, vegetable gardens, fertile oases. Assen, the capital city of the Drenta, is the centre of all this work of transformation. A great canal, into which run all the smaller canals of the peat district, extends almost entirely across the Drenta from Assen as far as the town of Meppel. Everywhere they are working to bring the land under tillage. The population of the province, which counted a little more than thirty thousand at the end of the last century, is now almost three times that number. ”

“ Peat - live earth, as it is called by the Dutch peasant - is the principal wealth of the Drenta, and one of the most profitable in all Holland. It gives work to thousands of hands; almost all the population of Holland use it for fuel ”

“ You think you are at the end of this desert-land, when it begins again: bush succeeds to bush, and solitude to solitude. On the dreary plain are seen here and there small mounds, which some believe to have been raised by the Celts, and others by the Germans, in which excavators have found earthen vessels, saws and hammers, calcined bones, stones for grinding grain, arrowheads, and rings which are supposed to have served for money. ”

“ Yet in some portions of this region the Dutch people, with their patient courage, and at the cost of infinite labor, have succeeded in making the pine, the beech, and the oak grow; they have even formed fine parks and have created complete groves, covering with useful plants, in less than thirty years, more than ten thousand hectares of land, and raising populous and flourishing villages where there was neither wood nor stone nor water, and where the first settlers were obliged to shelter themselves in caves dug out of the ground and covered with turf. ”

“ In the country they are called tombs of the Huns; tradition attributes them to the bands of Attila; the people say that they were brought into Holland by an ancient race of giants; the geologists believe that they came from Norway on the back of antediluvian glaciers; and the historian loses himself in vain conjectures. Everything in this strange province is antique and mysterious. ”

“ As you go on beyond Over-Yssel the country changes its aspect. Near Zvolle, the native town of the painter Lerburg, capital of the province, with about twenty thousand inhabitants, there are fine roads, bordered by trees, which refresh the eye after the bare and dreary country you have just traversed. ”

“ It consists of a row of rustic cottages, with wooden fronts and thatched roofs, which succeed one another, at a certain distance from each other, for the length of more than eight kilometres, planted each upon a narrow bank of earth which extends as far as the eye can see, and surrounded by a ditch full of water-plants, upon whose edge rise groups of alders, poplars, and willows. ”

“ Almost all the inhabitants are proprietors, can read and write, have a horse and eight or ten cows, never leave their colony, marry where they are born, pass their lives upon the same spot of ground, and close their eyes under the same roof where their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers lived and died. ”

“ A few clumps of small oaks, which are considered as traces of the former existence of ancient forests, are the only objects which rise above the surrounding underbrush; the partridge, the hare, and the wild cock are the only living creatures that meet the eye of the traveller. ”