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Updated: June 23, 2025
Through the hamlet of Lampit, the rear of whose dilapidated sheds and dwellings abut on reed-beds and stretches of unsightly slime and ooze. A desolate spot, bleak and wind-swept in winter, and even under blue skies, as to-day basking in sunshine, degraded by poverty and dirt. Some half-mile further is Horny Cross where, as the name indicates, four roads meet.
The pilot's eyes were riveted on the channel and yet, as morning drew near, from time to time there was a twinkle, a flash behind the reed-beds on the eastern bank, and now and then there was a rustling and clatter there. Was it a jackal that had plunged into the dense growth to surprise a brood of water-fowl; was it a hyena trampling through the thicket?
Honoria sat down sideways on the coping of the parapet. She watched the moor-hens, dark of plumage, a splash of fiery orange on their jaunty, little heads, swim out with restless, jerky motion from the edge of the reed-beds and break up the shining surface with diverging lines of rippling, brown shadow. In the shade cast by the bridge, trout rose at the dancing gnats and flies.
The parrots and crows, who had been chattering and shouting over their evening drink, had flown inland to roost, crossing the out-going battalions of the flying-foxes; and cloud upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and "honking" to the cover of the reed-beds. There were geese, barrel-headed and black-backed, teal, widgeon, mallard, and sheldrake, with curlews, and here and there a flamingo.
Now on this side, at a distance of a mile or so from the river, there were vast reed-beds standing on low land, dried to a hard crust by the summer heat, and right into the reeds the horses rushed and struggled to force their way through. The reeds were dead and dry, so tall that they rose high above the horses' heads, and growing so close together that it was hard to struggle through them.
"Yes, I heard it. I think it must be Mr Marston missed his way." "What! the young gent at the dreeaning! Hey, bud he'd no call to be out theer." "Where are you?" shouted Dick, who was ahead now and hurrying along the track that struck off to the big reed-beds and then away over the fen to the sea-bank. "Here! help!" came faintly.
With their narrow flat-bottomed punts, cut out of a single log, and their leaping-poles, wherewith they fly over dikes of thirty feet in width, they can ambuscade in those reed-beds and alder-beds, kill whom they will, and then flee away through the marsh like so many horse-flies.
The Somme River is here a very beautiful expanse of clear chalk water like a long wandering shallow lake. Through this shallow lake the river runs in half a dozen channels, which are parted and thwarted in many places by marsh, reed-beds, osier plots, and tracts of swampy woodland. There is nothing quite like it in England.
And he proceeded to tell her how, about a week ago, being caught by a wild flurry of rain in an outlying part of the island, behind the black cottages and Inn, he took shelter in a disused ruinous boat-house opening on the great reed-beds which here rim the shore.
II. Another element of true greatness that comes nobly out in the life with which I am dealing is its clear elevation above worldly good. That was the second point that our Lord's eulogium signalised. 'What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? But you would have gone to a palace, if you had wanted to see that, not to the reed-beds of Jordan.
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