But probably the most picturesque and truthful imaginative sketch of the old fenlands is that which was given in our own time by the graphic pen of Charles Kingsley in his fine novel of "Hereward the Wake," somewhat amplified afterwards in the chapters of "The Hermits," which he devoted to the history of St. Guthlac:-- "The fens in the seventh century," he says, "were probably very like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now in summer one sea of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines of poplar trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black wandering streams, broad lagoons, morasses submerged every spring-tide, vast beds of reed and sedge and fern, vast copses of willow and alder and grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallowing up slowly, all devouring, yet preserving the forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us) beneath the sea from age to age. Trees torn down by flood and storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back on the land. Streams bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature left to herself ran into wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one 'dismal swamp,' in which at the time of the Norman Conquest, 'the last of the English,' like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's tale, took refuge from their tyrants and lived like him a free and joyous life awhile."