These dikes, 120 miles of dike, mainly along both banks of this muddy Ems River, are now water-tight again, to the comfort of flax and clover: and this is but one item of the diking now on foot.

Readers do not know the Dollart, that uppermost round gulf, not far from Embden itself, in the waste embouchure of Ems with its continents of mud and tide.

Five hundred years ago, that ugly whirl of muddy surf, 100 square miles in area, was a fruitful field, "50 Villages upon it, one Town, several Monasteries and 50,000 souls:" till on Christmas midnight A.D.1277, the winds and the storm-rains having got to their height, Ocean and Ems did, "about midnight," undermine the place, folded it over like a friable bedquilt or monstrous doomed griddle-cake, and swallowed it all away.

Most of it, they say, that night, the whole of it within ten years coming; [Busching,--Erdbeschreibung,--v.

845, 846; Preuss, i.