THROUGH Chesterton, overlooked by the Castle and deriving its name from it, the road leaves Cambridge for Ely, passing through the village of Milton, where the Fenland begins, or what is more by usage than true description so-called now the Fens are drained and the land once sodden with water and covered with beds of dense reeds and rushes made to bear corn and to afford rich pasture for cattle. This is the true district of the "Cambridgeshire Camels," as the folk of the shire are proverbially called. The term, a very old one, doubtless took its origin in the methods of traversing the Fens formerly adopted by the rustic folk. They used stilts, or "stetches," as they preferred to call them, and no doubt afforded an amusing spectacle to strangers, as they straddled high above the reeds and stalked from one grassy tussock to another in the quaking bogs. There is a choice of routes at Milton, the road running in a loop for two miles. The left-hand branch, through Landbeach, selected by the Post Office as the route of its telegraph-poles, might on that account be considered the main road, but the right-hand route has decidedly the better surface. Midway of this course, where the Slap Up Inn stands, is the lane leading to Waterbeach, a scattered village near the Cam, much troubled by the floods from that stream in days gone by. Something of what Waterbeach was like in the eighteenth century may be gathered from the correspondence of the Rev. William Cole, curate there from 1767 to 1770. Twenty guineas a year was the modest sum he received, but that, fortunately for him, was not the full measure of his resources, for he possessed an estate in the neighbourhood. The value of his land could not have been great, and may be guessed from his letters. Writing in 1769, he says: "A great part of my estate has been drowned these two years: all this part of the country is now covered with water and the poor people of this parish utterly ruined." And again in 1770: "This is the third time within six years that my estate has been drowned, and now worse than ever." Shortly after writing that letter he removed. "Not being a water-rat," he says, "I left Waterbeach," and went to the higher and drier village of Milton, two miles away.