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"But natural things look so beautiful, father!" "In moderation, boy. Don't see any sign of Mr Marston yet, do you?" "No, father," replied Dick after taking a long look over the desolate level where the river wound between its raised banks toward the sea. "Can't very well miss his way," said the squire, half to himself. "Unless he came through the fen," said Dick. "Oh, he wouldn't do that!
The monks, too, vanished in time, as well as the fighting knights; yet the face of the land remained silent and deserted, and has remained so to the present moment. The traveller from the north can see, for thirty miles over the bleak and desolate fen regions, the stately towers of Burleigh Hall but can see little else beside.
Seems darker first coming out of the light." A fresh cry came from off the fen, and it was so unmistakably the word "Help!" that the squire and his son increased their pace. "Ahoy, there!" cried a big gruff voice. "Hickathrift?" "Ay, mester! Hear that! some un's in trouble over yonder." The wheelwright's big figure loomed up out of the darkness and joined them as they hurried on.
We have to question the people here as to the great swamps, and get them to send to the Fen people for guides who will lead us across the marshes to some spot where we can dwell above the level of the highest waters."
She looked up at the brown branches overhead, howling in the December gale, and down at the brown fen below, dying into mist and darkness as the low December sun died down; and it seemed as if her life was dying down with it. There would be no more sun, and no more summers, for her upon this earth. None certainly for her poor old mother.
"All I know is that something shot at me, and broke my finger just the same as something shot at Mester Marston. They don't like it, lads. Mark my words, they don't like it." "Who don't like what?" said Tom. "Will-o'-the-wisps don't like people cootting big drains acrost the fen, my lads.
When a taw is struck the owner is "dead" for that game, and the successful player keeps on shooting till he misses. When two or more ducks are knocked out of the ring, the player is entitled to raise his score by that number, provided he shouts "Dubs" before the others cry "Fen dubs."
While the roads converge like the rays of a wheel upon the inland town, each a stream of hurrying life, here the world flows to you more rarely and deliberately. Indeed, there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives from no point of the compass; nothing but a little tide of homely life ebbs and flows in these elm-girt villages above the fen.
For instead of mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times more numerous than all the wild venison of the primaeval jungle; and produces crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and more it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived and if they will, more virtuous and more happy than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit in his cell.
"Look!" cried Dick, as the reptile reached the edge of one of the many deep fen pools, whose amber-coloured water was so clear that the vegetation at the bottom could be seen plainly, and, lit up by the sunshine, seemed to be of a deep-golden hue across which every now and then some armoured beetle or tiny fish darted.
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