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Against the gnats, which are very abundant, they have contrived as follows: those who dwell above the fen-land are helped by the towers, to which they ascend when they go to rest; for the gnats by reason of the winds are not able to fly up high: but those who dwell in the fenland have contrived another way instead of the towers, and this it is: every man of them has got a casting net, with which by day he catches fish, but in the night he uses it for this purpose, that is to say he puts the casting-net round about the bed in which he sleeps, and then creeps in under it and goes to sleep: and the gnats, if he sleeps rolled up in a garment or a linen sheet, bite through these, but through the net they do not even attempt to bite.
The number of workers increased at the sea-bank, quite a colony growing up, and Dick paid several visits to the place with his father to see how busily the men were delving, while others built up what was termed a gowt a flood-gate arrangement for keeping out the sea at high water, and opening it at low, so as to give egress to the drain-water collected from the fen-land.
The fen-land is growing about here, and good land being swallowed up by the water. Five acres of my farm, which used to be firm and dry, have in my time become water-logged and useless. Now, are the few to give way to the many, or the many to give way to the few?" "Well, squire, the few think we ought to give way to them."
Although there were many hard places, there were still many wide districts of fen-land, in no way changed in appearance to what it had been when he left it, and often with difficulty he avoided riding into bogs, out of which it would have been almost impossible to extricate the horses. At length, to his great satisfaction, he reached a group of willows which he remembered well.
When they reached the dyke where the men were standing delving out the peat, it was to find a group of three fresh arrivals in the persons of Hickathrift the wheelwright, Dave, and John Warren, and all in earnest converse upon some subject. "Yow may say what yow like," cried Dave, "but fen-land's fen-land, and meant for the wild birds." "And rabbuds," put in John Warren.
I come from Cambridgeshire from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a clergyman. Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape; and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in the old colony and this country I have been for fifty years, for I was seventy yesterday.
And certainly there was no more difference than in the fact that the ditches at home were five or six feet wide, while the one the adventurers were having cut through the fen-land would be forty feet, and proportionately deep.
The fresh wind blew cheerily as we raced, my friend and I, across a long stretch of rich fen-land. The sunlight, falling somewhat dimly through a golden haze, lay very pleasantly on the large pasture-fields. There are few things more beautiful, I think, than these great level plains; they give one a delightful sense of space and repose.
And he was strongly disposed not to believe that bronze men would come to help him; but after no long time had passed, certain Ionians and Carians who had sailed forth for plunder were compelled to come to shore in Egypt, and they having landed and being clad in bronze armour, came to the fen-land and brought a report to Psammetichos that bronze men had come from the sea and were plundering the plain.
"Why didn't you go on?" cried Tom, as he came up with a very red face. "Don't want to be alone," replied Dick lazily, as he gazed away over the wide-stretching fen-land with the moist air quivering in the glorious sunshine. "I say, Tom, what a shame it seems!" "What seems a shame?" "Corn-fields and pastures and orchards are all very well, but the old fen does look so lovely now!"
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