aze, 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. The
distant lines of trees, the far-off church towers, the long dykes, the
hamlets half-hidden in orchards, the "sky-space and field-silence,"
give one a feeling of quiet rustic life lived on a large and simple
scale, which seems the natural life of the world.

Our goal was the remains of an old religious house, now a farm. We
were soon at the place; it stood on a very gentle rising ground, once
an island above the fen. Two great columns of the Abbey Church served
as gate-posts. The house itself lay a little back from the road, a
comfortable cluster of big barns and outhouses, with great walnut trees
all about, in the middle of an ancient tract of pasture, full of
dimpled excavations, in which the turf grew greener and more compact.
The farm-house itself, a large irregular Georgian building covered with
rough orange plaster, showed a pleasant tiled roof among the barns,
over a garden set with venerable sprawling box-trees. We found a
friendly old labourer, full of simple talk, who showed us the orchard,
with its mouldering wall of stone, pierced with niches, the line of dry
stew-ponds, the refectory, now a great barn, piled high with heaps of
grain and straw. We walked through byres tenanted by comfortable pigs
routing in the dirt. We hung over a paling to watch the creased and
discontented face of an old hog, grunting in shrill anticipation of a
meal. Our guide took us to the house, where we found a transept of the
church, now used as a brew-house, with the line of the staircase still
visible, rising up to a door in the wall that led once to the
dormitory, down the steps of which, night after night, the shivering
and sleepy monks must have stumbled into their chilly church for
prayers. The hall of the house was magnificent with great Norman
arches, once the aisle of the nave.

The whole scene had the busy, comfortable air of a place full of
patriarchal life, the dignity of a thing existing for use and not for
show, of quiet prosperity, of garnered provender and well-fed stock.
Though it made no deliberate attempt at beauty, it was full of a seemly
and homely charm. The face of the old fellow that led us about,
chirping fragments of local tradition, with a mild pride in the fact
that strangers cared to come and see the place, w