vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall
looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then,
lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high-standing
trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a
pleasant sound, and a black-timbered lock, with another old house
near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval
times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there
for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a
little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a
battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its
own disused wharf--a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age
as much as any hamlet I know. Then presently the interminable fen
stretches for miles and miles in every direction; you can see, from
the high green flood-banks of the river, the endless lines of
watercourses and far-off clumps of trees leagues away, and perhaps
the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast spacious
sky over-arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its
width, its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what
beauty is! Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened
there. It is a place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon
life of the past, the life of reed-beds and low-lying islands, of
marsh-fowl and fishes, into a hardly less peaceful life of
cornfield and pasture. No one goes there except on country
business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there. The sun goes
down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over and settle
in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges of
slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and
remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.