Then ensued wild confusion. Some snatched the caps and hats from those who were near them, some endeavoured to protect their own headgear from confiscation, and fought for them. Some thrust their own caps into the flames, and in ten minutes there was not one in the company but was without a cover for his crown.[1] Beamish had made angry resistance. Three men assailed him, tripped him up, and sent him sprawling on the alehouse floor. A fourth wrenched his hat away and thrust it into the flames, shouting, 'You're a fine chap to say all men are equal, and want to keep your own hat when the rest are bareheaded.' The landlord stepped outside, to see that the fiery tinder did not fall on and ignite the thatch. He returned and said, 'It is snowing.' 'Snowing, is it?' said Gotobed, staggering to the door. 'Then we shall all wear white night-caps to cool our heads.' Standing in the doorway, sustaining himself by a hand on each of the jambs, looking in, he shouted to his comrades, 'I am right. You are all wrong. At next election I ain't going to vote for no candidate as won't promise to make the rivers run uphill. Nothing will be as it ought to be—price of corn won't be low, and wages won't be high, and farmers cease to oppress, and bankers to send the money out of this country, and millers to fill their fists with flour, and Commissioners to pocket money that ought to have gone to the gangers, and collegians to cease to eat—till Providence has been forced to do what it ort—and make the rivers run uphill.' [Footnote 1: Burnt caps is a curious and inexplicable custom in the Fens. It is one that terminates many a brawl. If one man burns the hat of another, it is _de rigueur_ that all the rest of the company should surrender their headgear to complete the holocaust.] CHAPTER XVII A CRAWL ABROAD No country in the world is so subject to variations in the climate as England, and in no part of England are the variations so felt as in the Fens. No hills, no belts of trees there break the force of the wind. The gales rush over the plains unresisted from every quarter. Elsewhere there are hedgerows, on the sunny side of which appear the celandine and primrose in early spring, then the red-robin, the bluebell, our lady's smock, and the gorgeous spires of foxglove later still. There are no hedgeflowers in the Fens, for there are no hedges. Elsewhere the landscape is variegated with coppice that is brown in autumn and pine woods that are dark green all the year. It is not so in the Fens. There are no trees. When the snow falls, it envelops the entire surface in white.