nt young girls; they gathered and
increased, they became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out their
hands in a desire for the further shore: but the river ran between.

Then, as being next the gate, I again called out: When might we pass? A
Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when
the bridge was shut again. I said: When would that be? He said: Could I
not see that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, contrasting
the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the
Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for
me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.

Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself,
and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we
poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this
flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the
Ouse.

* * * * *

Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a
corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?

Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level
fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and
high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the
sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to
the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.

* * * * *

Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea
so inconspicuously.

The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in
battle--violent and heroic. The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy
sea. This coast of Eastern England is like the death of one of these
eastern merchants here--lethargic, ill-contented, drugged with ease. The
dry land slips, and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, confused
with a yellow thickness and brackish with the weight of inland water
behind.

I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth
of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles
indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the
thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea. You have, I say,
the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which
the ships can go; and on the other side you have, inhabited, a