in the course of these pages. I may go even farther, and assert that
there is no inhabitant of the brook and its banks whose biography and
structure are not full of absorbing interest, and will not occupy the
longest life, if only an attempt be made to study them thoroughly.

An almost typical example of slow-flowing brooks is to be found in the
remarkable channels which intersect the country between Minster and
Sandwich, and which, on the ordnance map, look almost like the threads
of a spider's web. In that flat district, the fields are not divided by
hedges, as in most parts of England, or by stone walls--"dykes," as they
are termed in Ireland--such as are employed in Derbyshire and several
other stony localities, but by channels, which have a strong
individuality of their own.

Even the smallest of these brooks is influenced by the tide, so that at
the two periods of slack water there is no perceptible stream.

Yesterday afternoon, having an hour or so to spare at Minster, I
examined slightly several of these streams and their banks. The contrast
between them and the corresponding brooklets of Oxford, also a low-lying
district, was very strongly marked.

In the first place, the willow, which forms so characteristic an
ornament of the brooks and rivers of Oxford, is wholly absent. Most of
the streamlets are entirely destitute of even a bush by which their
course can be marked; so that when, as is often the case, a heavy white
fog overhangs the entire district, looking from a distance as if the
land had been sunk in an ocean of milk, no one who is not familiarly
acquainted with every yard of ground could make his way over the fields
without falling into the watery boundaries which surround them.