at great city until years had passed, and I had gone
through the wonderful adventures which were to make a man of me, and
had come thither as the messenger of the second greatest Englishman,
as I think, who has lived in my time; aye, and had speech of him who
was the greatest of all. But of this hereafter.

The clammy air of the marshes clung about me and chilled my spirits,
as I proceeded through the desolate region which lay between me and
the town. The road hereabouts runs straight along for miles, without
hedge or fence, save for a couple of upright posts, with three or four
crossbars, rising up here and there at the corners of the fields where
the dykes run into one another. A hundred years before all this part
of Norfolk had been little better than a fen, which the Brandon Water
overflowed at spring tides, till engineers had come over to us from
Holland, who taught us to make these dykes and embankments after the
fashion of their country. And, indeed, the people of Bury have a
tradition that the ocean itself once came up over these parts, and
that their hamlet, however since decayed, was then a flourishing town
and seaport; but I could never find that any one outside of Bury
believed in this legend.

Be that as it may, I had but a doleful walk of it; moreover, I was
fain to button up my coat and pull my collar close about my neck, by
reason of the cutting wind which blew across from the German seas. Nor
did I meet any adventure on the way, but in avoiding the turnpike at
Broxall I was forced to leap a dyke in the dark, and missing the
further bank by about a foot, I fell into the water knee-deep. I got a
sound drenching, but no other damage except for the mud bespattering
my clothes, which must have presented a sorry spectacle had there been
any there to observe me.

The noise of my splash brought out the pike-man, uttering many oaths,
to see who it was that had been defrauding his gate. But I got nimbly
on to my legs and ran past, and though he made a show of chasing me
for a short space, he soon thought better of it, and went back to his
bed.

It must have been, I suppose, half-way between midnight and dawn when
I arrived in Yarmouth. And well pleased I was when I had safely
crossed the bridge across the Bure river and felt the pavement of the
town underneath my feet. For though there was not another soul abroad
in the streets at that hour, that I could perceive, yet the knowledge
that the houses on either