Further on, in a low situation, is DENVER, a large village, noted as the birth place of _Dr. Robert Brady_, the English historian. The church is a mean structure, built of _Car_, _or rag-stone_, _camerated_ with _wooden_ pannells, and covered with _reed_, or _thatch_. Near to this place is _Denver Sluice_, termed the grand _erratum_ in our fen improvements.—Not far from Denver and Downham lies the village of _Helgay_, said by some authors {204} to be regularly infested, every six or seven years, by an incredible number of field mice, which, like locusts, would infallibly devour all the corn of every kind, but for the friendly, seasonable, and effectual interposition of a prodigious flight of owls from Norway, which never fail to arrive that year, and stay till they have totally destroyed those mischievous vermin: after which they quietly depart, re-cross the seas, and return to their native forests, attended by the veneration and benediction of all the good people of Helgay, who had derived from them, the most essential benefit, without the least mixture of detriment; as they had, during their whole stay, meddled with no one thing in the place, but the mice.—Such is the substance and purport of this curious story, whose questionable and improbable appearance might be supposed more than sufficient to prevent its being ever passed upon the public as a matter of fact. That, however, has not been the case: it has been therefore introduced here for the purpose of exhibiting it in its true light, as a lying tale, that those credulous people who have been imposed upon, and misled by others, may be undeceived.