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But that same barrier, ere the fen was drained, backed up for ages not only the silt, but the very water of the fens; and spread it inland into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs, on those impervious clays which floor the fen.
Large mould candles were also sold so cheap by the Russians that it was worth while to bring them home for the use of the whole family, even to burn in the stables and stalls, as the supply of bears' fat was precarious, and the pine-tree was too precious, so far north, to be split up into torches, while it even fell so short occasionally as to compel the family to burn peat, which they did not like nearly so well as pine-logs.
"To be sure! Pine and birch don't grow in peaty swamps, but in sandy ground with plenty of gravel. Look all about you at the scores of great pine-roots my men have dug out. They are all pine, and there must have been quite a large forest here once." "And was that farther back?" "Perhaps thousands of years before the Danes first landed. The peat preserves the wood, Tom.
He saw that it was one of those districts where peat had been taken out in large squares for fuel, and where a fallacious and verdant scum upon the surface of deep pools simulated the turf that had been removed. He saw that the battle-ground presented to him by his sagacious enemy was one great sweep of traps and pitfalls. Before he could carry the position, many men must necessarily be engulfed.
A ditch, half full of dark water, bordered each side of the road, which went straight as a rod through a black peat moss lying cheerless and dreary on all sides hardly less so where the sun gleamed from the surface of some stagnant pool filling a hole whence peats had been dug, or where a patch of cotton grass waved white and lonely in the midst of the waste expanse.
We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can, therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth.
"If we dinna, and I get back at a', which is dootfu', I shall gae back wi' barely a dozen loons to my tail, an' the Cawmbells, be damned to every man o' the name, will ride on my back for the rest of my days." "Ye're in the right of it, Strowan," said my Lord Ogilvie. "There's too few of us for this work, but a little peat will boil a little pot. Let us gang back and raddle the Glasgow bodies.
'Then do exactly as you think best, he let fall to his wife as he went, referring to the chaos of expenses she had been discussing with him. 'That'll be all right. For his mind had not yet sorted the jumble of peat, oil, boots, school- books, and the rest.
Thus, for instance, the Scotch fir is not now, nor ever has been in historic times, a native of the Danish isles, yet it has been indigenous there in the human period, for Steenstrup has taken out with his own hands a flint implement from beneath one the buried trunks of that species in the Danish peat bogs.
As to the first, some affect pure loam, others peat only, yet more a half and half of both, with a liberal proportion of gritty sand, or a little smashed charcoal or bruised bones as porous or feeding agents, or both.
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