I passed out of the wrought-iron gates, and went into the meadows on the east side of the Abbey. The fields lay brown still, and were as bare as a billiard-table. They had been closely nipped by industrious sheep during long winter months, and now there was but little for the young life to feed on. Old, heavy, grey-faced ewes were bleating and baaing, whilst skipping, capering and leaping about were some eight or nine lambs. What jocund games theirs were, what heights they jumped, and with all four legs off the ground at once. As I looked, I wondered what were the rules of the game, and what impulse directed their sport; for there seemed to be a leader in the revels, who ran and skipped first, after which they all ran round, mounted an incline, descended and mounted it afresh, cutting a hundred capers, and playing a hundred pranks, but all according to some old unwritten law and regulation. After a few moments of watching the pretty little creatures, I made my way to the old embankment which runs across the meadows on the southern side, and which formed once the mighty dam of the artificial lake from which the prior of Wenlock drew up his fish in Lent and on special fast days. There probably during the Middle Ages the lake was well supplied with carp, eels, trout, and perch. Old Dame Juliana Berners, the prioress of Sopwell, near St. Albans, wrote much and praised warmly the pleasures of angling. "If the sport fail," she wrote, "at least the angler hath his holsom walke, and may enjoy at his ease the ayre and swete savoure of the medes of floures that maketh him hungry and he may hear also the melodious harmony of fowles." She then goes on to say that he can see also, thus happily employed, "the wild broods of young swannes, heerons, duckes, cotes and all other fowles," and declares that a silent walk by stream or lake in her eyes confers a greater and deeper happiness upon the angler "than all the noyse of hounds," than "the blasts of hornes," or "the wilde scrye that hunters of fawkeners can make." I like to think of the holy brothers fishing here in their hours of recreation, after their vigils, fasts, and prayers. As I walked along I saw the group of willows that had turned crimson and brilliant amber, and far away I heard the cawing of the rooks as they flew over the plantation of poplars, which, too, were turning red. I followed along the Abbot's Walk, as the townspeople term the dam, and then passed through a hunting gate across a wild field of scrubby bushes and rough herbage where the wild plover was uttering her melancholy cry and wheeled in circles overhead. The mole-catcher had been at work, a string of velvety moles hung like grapes upon a thorn.