It is here, at this meeting of the waters, that "Rebeck, or Priests' Houses," is marked on the maps of Speed and Dugdale, and attributed to the thirteenth century, but what this place was, no man knoweth. It has clean vanished from sight or knowledge, and the houses of Brandon Creek hamlet afford no clue, being wholly secular and commonplace, from the inn that stands at the meeting of the rivers to the humble cottages of the bankers and the gaulters. Southery Ferry is but a little distance ahead, to be recognised by the inn that stands on the river bank. It is a lonely ferry, and little wonder that it should be, considering the emptiness of the country on the other side,--all fens at the Back of Beyond, to whose wastes cometh the stranger never, where the bull-frogs croak, the slodger slodges among the dykes, and the mists linger longest. [Illustration: THE OUSE.] Away ahead sits Southery village, enthroned upon its hillock, once an island in the surrounding fen, and still, in its prominence against the skyline, telling its story plain for all to learn. Even if it were not thus evident from Southery Ferry how the village of old sat with its feet in the mud and its head on the dry land, at least the pilgrim's wheels presently advise him in unmistakable fashion that he is on an ascent. There is little in the village itself to interest the stranger. The spire so picturesquely crowning the hill in the distant view is found on close acquaintance to be that of a modern church, filled with the Papistical abominations commonly found in these days of the forsworn clergy of the Church of England. The old church of St. Mary, disused forty years ago, and now in ruins, stands at a little distance, in a bend of the road, overlooking many miles of what was once fen. There it stands in its heaped-up graveyard, a shattered and roofless shell of red-brick and rubble walls, thickly overgrown with ivy, and neighboured by an old windmill as battered and neglected as itself. From a field-gate overlooking the levels you see, in the distance, the high ground about Thetford, and, near at hand, an outlying part of Southery called Little London. An old inhabitant shares the field-gate and the outlook with the present writer, and surveys the many miles with a jaundiced eye. He remembers those lands below, when he was a boy, all swimming with water. Now they are drained, and worth ever so much an acre, "'cause they'll, as you might say, grow anything. But a man can't earn mor'n fourteen shillun a week here. No chance for nobody." [Illustration: SOUTHERY FERRY.] No local patriot he. He was born here, married in the old church forty years ago, and went away to live in Sheffield. "Ah! that _is_ a place," says he. That is a phrase capable of more than one interpretation, and we feelingly remark, having been there, that indeed a place it _is_. His regretful admiration of Sheffield is so mournful that we wonder why he ever left.