there is nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste place; for in some parts are apple trees, in others vines, which are either spread on the ground or raised on poles. A mutual strife is there between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which 'tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear ?**-* But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces his way into the isle of St. Ethelreda, and, hospitably entertained there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle. He cannot praise enough-his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, "abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the pools around are netted cels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot (surely a mistake for sturgeon), are said often to be taken. But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound. Innumerable geese, galls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime," and so forth; till, as be assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, "ere they will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare." And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in those days, under dark skies, in houses-even the most luxurious of them-which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the dreary winter nights the whistle of the wind and wild cries of the waterfowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made those fiends take hideous shapes to the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man's bed of sedge. or મંદ The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and embanking of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow down from the wolds above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, vallum," along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works. Each village was isolated by its own "march" of forest; each yeoman, all but isolated by the "eaves-drip," or green lane round his farm. Each "cared for his own things, and none for those of others;" and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the fen-save those old Roman villages returned to its primæval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local selfgovernment into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without calling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the English feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the next parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half-abrick at him, or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, that the necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute powers of nature first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a common interest between men of different countries and races. But the progress was very slow; and the first civilisers of the fen were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the medieval man for good or for evil, sprang a civilisation of which they never dreamed. Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf's "History of Crowland" (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf, and his continuator, "Peter of Blois;" and even when their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are equally instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of the men of old. Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge. il There they may read how the young warriornoble, Guthlac ("The Battle-Play," the "Sport of War"), tired of slaying and sinning, bothought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, whero one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old "law," as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into secking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit's cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant, now as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and instal himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebukes the offender into confession, and its sanctuary of the four rivers, all goes well to the end. reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him, discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint's hand, now on his shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat, Guthlac made answer, " "Know you not that he who hath led his life according to God's will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw the more near!” After fifteen years vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, There you may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct in the fens of the creatures, who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and fire" Develen and luther gostes" --such as tormented in likewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasure-hoards; how they "filled the house with their coming, and poured in on every But within these four rivers, at least, were neither side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere. tyranny nor slavery. Those who took refuge in St. They were in countenance horrible, and they had Guthlac's place from cruel lords must keep his great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; peace toward each other, and earn their living like they were filthy and squalid in their boards, and honest men, safe while they so did; for between they had rough cars, and crooked nebs,' and force those four rivers St. Guthlac and his abbot were eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like the only lords, and neither summoner, nor sheriff of horses tusks; and their throats were filled with the king, nor armed force of knight or carl, could flame, and they were grating in their voice; they enter "the inheritance of the Lord, the soil of St had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary and distorted toes, and cried hoarsely with their of St. Guthlac and his monks the minster free from voices; and they came with such immoderate noise worldly servitude; the special almshouse of most and immense horror, that him thought that all be- illustrious kings;, the sole refuge of any one in tween heaven and earth resounded with their voices. worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the And they tugged and led him out of the cot, saints; the possession of religious men, specially set and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk apart by the he common council of the realm; by reason him in the muddy waters. After that they brought of the frequent, miracles of the 1 holy confessor St. him into the wild places of the wilderness, among the Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was vineyards of Engedi; and by reason of the privileges torn. After that they took him and beat, him granted by the kings, a city of grace and safety to all with iron whips, and after that they brought him on who repent." their creaking wings between the cold regions of the air." But there are gentler and more human, touches in that old legend. You may read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he fed them after their kind. How the ravens tormented him, stealing letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with compunction at his thes Does not all this sound-as I said just now-ke a voice from another planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it han done its work, and civilisation of the fen should be taken up carried out by men like th good knight, Richard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward's granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work I Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day. For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby- -so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever-St. Guthlac, by his canoevoyage into Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the was proceeded with once more; and during the first half of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work done, as all work is done in this world, not as well as it should have been done, but at least done. To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans; to take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer or a fen-man, Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers-more than one Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at their head-trying to start a great scheme for draining the drowned "middle level" east of the Isle of Ely. How they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford us their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him' meanly, though indeed University of Cambridge, in the new world which "Lynn Law" ofd had, in the matter of the fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, colonised and Christianised, 800 years after St. Guthlac's death. The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years slowly, and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a certain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from Littleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests-houses), and found, to his horror and those of the fen-men, that be had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in selfdefence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered--such little of them as could be drained at all-for nigh 200 years. Honour, meanwhile, to another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the great leam from Guyhirn--the last place at which one could see a standing gallows, and two Irish reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn for the sake of hidden | treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings and a few silver spoons, The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of the fens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries. The state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to these fen-lands. No one can read the account of their debts, neglect, malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing that the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands dry must have suffered, as did everything else be longing to the convents. It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth's reign that the recovery of these "drowned lands" given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good carl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called "Pretended Ordinance" of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.'s Government were content to call it "pretended" and let it stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford added, in 1649, to his father's "old Bedford River" that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and "washes," i.c. waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and so forth,-all is written, or rather, only half or quarter written, in the histories of the fens. Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half written indeed, only hinted at-the mixed population of the fens. The sturdy old "Girvii," "Gyrwas," men of the "gyras" or marshes, who in Hereward's time sang their three-man glees, "More Girviorum tripliciter canentes," had been crossed with the blood of Scandinavian Vikings in Canute's conquest; crossed again with English refugees from all quarters during the French conquest under William. After the St. Bartholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France-dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, THE SON FRETTING AGAINST whose names and physiognomies are said still to remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden's Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them. After the battle of Dunbar another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed by Cromwell's government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men to this day. Within the memory of men, Scotchmen used to come down into the fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit their expatriated kinsmen. [Good Words, May 1, 1867. faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank will break, and slowly they draw off-sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten, but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at instantly by men who have existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which studied from their youth, as the necessity of their lands, in many cases, are lower still than those outside. are all below the water level, and where the inner teams are harnessed, the waggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go round cheerily, So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do something, if not all, and stop the sluice is gone past hope; through the breach pours a roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside on which so much depends. As for the outer land, it of the bank, which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope. Be it so, then. At the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the water out; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, the same everlasting fight with wind and wave which their forefathers have waged for now 800 years. To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more than even the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, we may attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for now nigh three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdy independence and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town, to seek their fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea. And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who when the Marshland men (possibly the Romanised inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle for a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when the north-caster is howling above, the spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way will repine no more that the primeval forest is cut lapping up to the dyke-top, or flying over in sheets down, the fair mere drained. For instead of mamHe who sees as I have seen a sight like that, of spray; when round the one fatal thread which is moth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle trickling over the dyke or worse, through some for- many times more numerous than all the wild venison gotten rat's hole in its side-hundreds of men are of the primeval jungle; and produces crops capable clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute beings; and more-it produces men a hundred times as powers of nature, not for their employer's sake alone, numerous than ever it produced before; more healthy of nourishing a hundred times as many human but for the sake of their own year's labour, and their and long lived-and if they will, more virtuous and own year's bread. The sheep have been driven off more happy-than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the fen, will breathe one sigh over the last scrap of wilworst befall. But a hundred spades, wielded by prac-derness, and say no more; content to know that— or holy hermit in his cell. So we, who knew the deep tised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole. trickle becomes a rush--the rush a roaring waterfall. The dyke-top trembles-gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors in a wreck, with The I "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, THE SON FRETTING AGAINST THE RESTRAINTS OF HIS HOME. "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?"-Genesis iii, 1. "THE Son of Adam, which was the son of God," is the climax, in St. Luke's Gospel, of the human genealogy of Jesus. Adam was, in right of creation -a right as yet clear and unforfeited-a son of God. And this son, like other sons, had a home-a home in the blessed Paradise, watered by its four streams, and enlightened by a supernatural Presence. And that home, like other homes, had its restraints as well as its blessings. There stood just one tree in the very midst of the garden, concerning which it day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." was said to him, "Thou shalt not eat of it. And the text tells how there arose we know not whether late or early, for the flight of years is unIn the marked in the paradisiacal blessedness this son against the restraints, against this one restraint, of his home; how the fallen spirit used this ns the engine of his first assault upon man's innocence, a fretting of Good Words, May 1, 1807.] THE RESTRAINTS OF HIS HOME. making him ponder the fact and question the reasonableness of this single prohibition by which the Almighty Father asserted his sovereignty over the child whom He had formed and the earth, which He had created. Thus the third chapter of the Bible furnishes the appropriate text for our present meditation, of which the thesis is- t The son fretting against the Restraints of his Поте. His Home. The word Home is full of restful thoughts and tender associations. The family, of which home is the centre, is God's primary and original ordinance. There was a family before there was a state: there was a family before there was a Church. Out of family life grew naturally all other modes of being --social, civil, political, ecclesiastical. For long ages the family was the Church; and the birthright of the firstborn included the priesthood and the intercession. If the stream of civilisation should ever flow back upon itself if factitious inequalities should be levelled, political institutions overthrown, the Church itself (so far as it rests upon outward supports) demolished and done away-there would still be the source and spring of all, so long as there is the Home: there might man still love, and there might the universal Father still be worshipped. Even as it is, while the complications of society continue as we have them, the deepest of all truths, the most real of all facts, the most stable and solid of all relations, is that of the family, that of the home. It begins carlier, it strikes deeper, it penetrates more thoroughly the whole fabric of the being, than any other influence or any other reality. If a home is corrupt, woe to the life! If a father's character, if a 1, mother's example, cannot be depended upon, where is the new cruso, where is the healing salt, which shall give back its sparkling vitality to that spring of the waters ? Even without this worst supposition, who has not noticed the injurious effect upon a young life, upon the character of a man throughout life, to have had, from circumstances, no home-to have been deprived, by death, or by a separation like death, of the enjoyment, of the use, of the possession, of a home? Children, young men, grown men, value your homes! Give God daily thanks for them. Little do you know--for these are blessings seldom appreciated till they are withdrawn-all that is contained for you-all of safety, all of happiness, all of blessing within the four walls of your home. But now this Home, of which such glorious things are spoken, and of which we have not told one thousandth part of its mercies-this home is a society, this home is a polity, is a little state, is a little church. Then, like other societies, it must have its rules; like other polities, it must have its laws. And rules are restraints. They are, so far as they go, limitations upon the self-will. They are conditions apon which alone the benefits of the community can Where is the home which has no laws? be enjoyed. which imposes no restrictions upon its members whether natural members, the children-or acquired *| But our present subject should remind us rather such excuse to palliate it. It does happen-such is of a fretting against home restraints, which has no fallen naturo-even to a wise and loving father, to have, in the best of homes, an unamiable and a disobedient son. There is a vast difference-who can gainsay it ?-between the natural dispositions, tempers, and temptations of different persons. In one point of view, this is a great mystery. Where is the equality of God's government, even in moral and spiritual things? Where is that reconciling, harmowhat we cannot but call the diverse advantages of nizing principle which shall make compensation for even for salvation? We must leave these questions in one and another, even for obedience, even for morality, "Shall not the Judge of all the the hands of God. earth do right?" "Shall the thing formed say to Him we know already--that no one need be wicked. The that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus ?" This another; but God "giveth more grace" as man needs struggle may seem to be more severe for one than for more, and will most surely give enough of His grace to every one who asks Him. Meanwhile every home has its restraints, and the undutiful son frets against them. He is impatient of its indirect, unexpressed, understood restrictions. He feels himself ill at case in that presence in which an irreverent expression would be an insult, and an impure, jest an impossibility; in which, whatever he may be elsewhere, he cannot possibly introduce any |