III.
Fen-land and Fen-men.
(Golden Hours, 1873.)
King George the Third and the author of the "Political Register" have given the best descriptions of Fen-land to be met with. The king's is the briefer and more comprehensive. "What, what!" he exclaimed, "Lincolnshire? All flats, fogs, and fens—eh, eh?" But Cobbett's is the most graphic. "Here," he writes, "I am in the heart of the Fens. The whole country is level as the table on which I am now writing; the horizon like the sea in a dead calm. You see the morning sun come up just as at sea, and see it go down over the rim in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. Everything grows well here; earth without a stone as big as a pin's head, grass as thick as it can grow upon the ground, immense bowling-greens separated by ditches, and not a sign of a dock or thistle."
Nevertheless it lacks several features necessary to complete the picture.
The cottages standing beneath the roadway, surrounded by water, and reached by bridges or planks across the ditches,—the road itself a long straight causeway, locally called a rampire, running for miles by the side of a dyke, and on which you may trudge for an hour without a turn or change in the scene; the moist meadows below, intersected by innumerable sluggish streams, "where the dwarf sallows creep," and where the ducks paddle away their time, or spend it searching for hidden treasure in the rich mud,—the black boat aground on the dyke bank, or lying in the outfall of some ditch with nets and snares nigh at hand;—and last of all, standing out against the gloomy sky there are the
