The road between Southery and Hilgay dips but slightly and only for a short distance, proving the accuracy, at this point at least, of Dugdale's map showing the Fen-islands of Hilgay and Southery conjoined. They are divided by the long, straight, and narrow cut called "Sam's Cut Drain," crossed here at Modney Bridge. Here the true Fenland begins only to be skirted, and hedgerows once more line the way, a sign that of itself most certainly proclaims fields enclosed and cultivated in the long ago. The ditches, too, are dry, and not the brimming water-courses they have been these last twenty-five miles. Moreover, here is hedgerow timber: ancient elms and oaks taking the place of the willows and poplars that have been our only companions throughout a whole county. They have not consciously been missed, but now they are come again, how fresh and dear and welcome they are, and how notable the change they produce! Between Hilgay and that old farmhouse called "Snore Hall," from an absurd tradition that King Charles once slept there, we cross the river Wissey and the Catchwater Drain. The road between is still known as "the Causeway," and, with the succeeding village of Fordham, teaches in its name a lesson in old-time local geography. In 1809, when that old tourist, William Gilpin, passed this way, Hilgay Fen extended to one thousand acres. According to the picturesque story told him, the district was periodically visited, every six or seven years, by an innumerable host of field-mice, which began to destroy all vegetation and would have laid everything bare but for a great flight of white horned-owls that, as if by instinct, always arrived at such times from Norway and, immediately attacking the mice, destroyed them all, when they disappeared as suddenly as they had come. XLV