That heathen rites were celebrated here in the pre-historic era seems very probable, the best etymologists agreeing that the name is a corruption of _Wise-man_, or _Wish-man_; that is, of the old Norse god Woden, who is still supposed to drive his spectral hounds across the silent wastes of Dartmoor. Celtic or Cymric memorials, as we have previously hinted, are very abundant and very various. There are cromlechs, where the Britons buried their dead; stone pillars, with which they commemorated their priests and heroes; avenues of upright stones leading up to the circles, where, perhaps, their priests celebrated their religious rites; kistvaens, or stone-chests, containing the body unburned; tolmêns, or holed stones, whose meaning cannot be determined, but which may probably have had some astronomical uses; bridges, huts, and walled villages, all bearing traces of the handiwork of our "rude forefathers." There is no spot in England so thronged as this with the shadows of a remote, a mysterious, and an irrecoverable past. * * * * * From Dartmoor our wanderings take us to the eastern coast, and the district of THE FENS, now so rapidly yielding to the labour of the agriculturist as to exhibit but rare glimpses of their ancient "savagery." It extends inland, around an arm of the North Sea called the Wash, into the six counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk, with an area of upwards of 420,000 acres. Inland it is bounded by an amphitheatral barrier of high lands, and touches the towns of Bolingbroke, Brandon, Earith, Milton, and Peterborough. Into this great basin flow the waters of the greater part of the drainage of nine counties, which gather into the rivers Cam, Glen, Lark, Nene, Great and Little Ouse, Stoke, and Welland, these being linked together by a network of natural and artificial canals.