their fortunes could not wait for the streets to be laid out and houses
to be built, but established themselves in the environs, building
themselves hovels and temporary residences, although certain to find
their encampments swept away with the steady expanse of the city. As
much land as could be covered by a man's foot was worth a ducat in gold.

In every branch of human industry these republicans took the lead. On
that scrap of solid ground, rescued by human energy from the ocean, were
the most fertile pastures in the world. On those pastures grazed the
most famous cattle in the world. An ox often weighed more than two
thousand pounds. The cows produced two and three calves at a time, the
sheep four and five lambs. In a single village four thousand kine were
counted. Butter and cheese were exported to the annual value of a
million, salted provisions to an incredible extent. The farmers were
industrious, thriving, and independent. It is an amusing illustration of
the agricultural thrift and republican simplicity of this people that on
one occasion a farmer proposed to Prince Maurice that he should marry his
daughter, promising with her a dowry of a hundred thousand florins.

The mechanical ingenuity of the Netherlanders, already celebrated by
Julius Caesar and by Tacitus, had lost nothing of its ancient fame. The
contemporary world confessed that in many fabrics the Hollanders were at
the head of mankind. Dutch linen, manufactured of the flax grown on
their own fields or imported from the obedient provinces, was esteemed a
fitting present for kings to make and to receive. The name of the
country had passed into the literature of England as synonymous with the
delicate fabric itself. The Venetians confessed themselves equalled, if
not outdone, by the crystal workers and sugar refiners of the northern
republic. The tapestries of Arras--the name of which Walloon city had
become a household word of luxury in all modern languages--were now