Page:A Tour Through the Batavian Republic.djvu/44

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32
TOUR THROUGH

places are between five and six feet below the level of the road. This I believe never happens, but the apparent danger is sufficient to excite the anxiety of timorous travellers; and the badness of the road, which is made without gravel and abounds in deep ruts, keeps alive their fears.

At a distance, Rotterdam appears a well-built and extensive city, and the approach to it displays the opulence and industry of its inhabitants. The number of mills, principally for sawing timber, in the suburbs, is prodigious; but few of them were at work, though the weather was extremely favourable, and some were in a state so ruinous, that they must have long been unemployed. The sawing-mills are inventions of the greatest utility, both for abridging the labour of man, and performing work with the neatest accuracy. They are lofty and somewhat agreeable erections, the mill generally rising from the top of a substantial building two or three stories high, and of a sufficient altitude to give its necessary rotundity a light and airy appearance. Some of them are