ad widened to three or four times their first
breadth, the fields being equally contracted. Starting from all sides at
once, these brambles and briars in the course of about twenty years met
in the centre of the largest fields.

Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and
thorns from grazing animals, the suckers of elm-trees rose and
flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted
their heads. Of old time the cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves
with the grass so soon as they were out of the ground, but now most of
the acorns that were dropped by birds, and the keys that were wafted by
the wind, twirling as they floated, took root and grew into trees. By
this time the brambles and briars had choked up and blocked the former
roads, which were as impassable as the fields.

No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns,
briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and
these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the
country into an immense forest. Where the ground was naturally moist,
and the drains had become choked with willow roots, which, when confined
in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox, sedges and flags and
rushes covered it. Thorn bushes were there, too, but not so tall; they
were hung with lichen. Besides the flags and reeds, vast quantities of
the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or six feet high, and the
willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled
every approach.

By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills
only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of
wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long
since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which
should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into
the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields,
forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.

As no care was taken with the brooks, the hatches upon them gradually
rotted, and the force of the winter rains carried away the weak timbers,
flooding the lower grounds, which became swamps of larger size. The
dams, too, were drilled by water-rats, and the streams percolating
through, slowly increased the size of these tunnels till the structure
burst, and the current swept on and added to the floods