The property is bisected by an immense straight dike, which is called the Middle Wash, and which is so sluggish, so straight, so ugly, and so deep, as to impress the mind of a stranger with the ideas of suicide.

The property is bisected by an immense straight dike, which is called the Middle Wash, and which is so sluggish, so straight, so ugly, and so deep, as to impress the mind of a stranger with the ideas of suicide.

The roads, even the best of them, are mere paths, narrow, deep sunk between enormous dikes, and so fenced by hedges and trees, as to be almost impervious to the light of day.

They inclose considerable areas with little dikes of mud, leaving openings for the entrance of the water, which are closed as the tide falls.

An hour's summer walk, in the company of some one who knows what to look for and how to look for it, by the side of one of those stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish you with subjects for a month's investigation, in the form of plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written.

In a lost corner of the great lowland flat of Flanders, defended from the sea by an artificial dike, and at the point of intersection of an intricate network of canals and waterways, there arose in the early Middle Ages a trading town, known in Flemish as Brugge, in French as Bruges (that is to say, The Bridge), from a primitive structure that here crossed the river.

Nothing impresses the visitor to Holland more than the vast dikes or dams which restrain the sea from overwhelming the country.

" He looked up, and then still up, until, at the flat top of the castellated dike that stood over him, he caught a gleam of pink.