philanthropist’s celebrated son, the Bishop of Oxford was born, and where I have spent more than one pleasant day when Sir John Puleston lived there, has been since burnt down. CHAPTER IX. AN OLD-FASHIONED TOWN. Woodbridge and the country round—Bernard Barton—Dr. Lankester—An old Noncon. The traveller as he leaves the English coast for Antwerp or Rotterdam or the northern ports of Germany, may remember that the last glimpse of his native land is the light from Orford Ness, which is a guiding star to the mariner as he ploughs his weary way along the deep. Of that part of Suffolk little is known to the community at large. When I was a boy it was looked upon as an _ultima Thule_, where the people were in a primitive state of civilization; where shops and towns and newspapers and good roads were unknown; where traditions of smuggling yet remained. Few ever went into that region, and those who did, when they returned, did not bring back with them encouraging reports. Barren sandy moors, along which the bitter east wind perpetually blew, fatal alike to vegetation and human life, were the chief characteristics of a district the natives of which were not rich, at any rate as regards this world’s goods. Orford, like Dunwich, was once a place of some importance. ‘A large and populous town with a castle of reddish stone,’ writes Camden, but in his time a victim of the sea’s ingratitude; ‘which withdraws itself little by little, and begins to envy it the advantages of a harbour.’ In the time of Henry I., writes Ralph de Coggeshall, when Bartholomew de Glanville was Governor of its castle, some fishermen there caught a wild man in their nets. ‘All the parts of his body resembled those of a man. He had hair on his head, a long-peaked beard, and about the breast was exceeding hairy and rough. But at length he made his escape into the sea, and was never seen more,’ which was a pity, as undoubtedly he was the ‘missing link.’ Besides, as Camden remarks, the fact was a confirmation of what the common people of his time remarked. ‘Whatever is produced in any part of nature is in the sea,’ and shows ‘that not all is fabulous what Pliny has written about the Triton on the coasts of Portugal, and the sea man in the Straits of Gibraltar.’ Nor is that the only wonder connected with the district. Close by is Aldborough, where the poet Crabbe learned to become, as Byron calls him, ‘Nature’s sternest painter, but the best;’