If you begin at Cambridge and draw a line along the high land by St. Ives, east of Peterborough, by Spalding and Boston, down to the Humber, you will find the tract of land known as the Fen Country. That country has undergone within the last seventy or eighty years, or a great part of it, a change even more striking than that which has passed over the uplands. At first you would be inclined to doubt whether there were any such places as the Fens at all. If you say to anybody “Don’t you live in the Fens”? the reply will be “Oh, no.” At Peterborough we are not in the Fens. Of course not! There is Flag Fen, and there is Borough Fen, but we are on high ground, and not in the Fen, and you will find, even if you go east of Wisbech, where the land is called marsh land, which sounds rather funny, that the farmers and graziers there will say they don’t live in the Fens. And walking towards the sea you will always be told you have come to the wrong place, you must go a little further, and then you will find the Fen country! But still, take the Fens as we know them, extending from Peterborough to Cambridge, and down by Boston nearly to the Humber. I will confine my observations to that which most comes within my own knowledge, that district of the Fens known as the Bedford Level, called the South, the Middle, and the North Level. From the beginning of Crowland on the North, down to, say, the Middle by March and Lynn, and the South down to Cambridge. In the year 1637 a Charter was passed by Charles I. for the improvement of that country, and we form some notion of what it must have been—the weary waste of waters it must have been—from the preamble of the Charter of Incorporation. It is described as being generally covered with water, of little advantage to mankind, except yielding some few river fish and water fowl, that is when you may catch them, and on lucky days you may shoot wild ducks. Adventurers had endeavoured to make lines of meadows, which had made such progress that it was hoped this place, which had lately presented nothing to the eye but waters and a few reeds thinly scattered here and there, might, under Divine mercy, become some of it pleasant pasture for cattle, with many houses belonging to the inhabitants. That seemed to have been the extreme notion of what could be made of that country in the way of production. Going on to the year 1830, when the last history of the Bedford Level was written by Mr. Samuel Wells, well known as the Register of the Corporation, he speaks of it seventy-five years ago as a matter of congratulation that at that time, when they had improved it sufficiently to grow oats and cole seed, that the cultivation of wheat had begun to extend itself into the Fen country. He spoke of it almost as a novelty, and says that the Corporation, soon after its formation, had interfered to prevent the inhabitants, occupiers, and owners of property from improving and draining by mills.