Some parts of the Fens, especially on the Lincolnshire side, have been long famous for breeding vast flocks of tame _Geese_, of which great numbers are usually sent alive to the London markets.—They have also a remarkable custom of _plucking_ the geese, and stripping them of their quills and feathers repeatedly every year, {79b} and so render each of them conformable to _Plato’s_ memorable definition of _man_, “a two-legged, unfeathered animal:” in which view it might be called _humanizing_ the poor geese, or converting them into so many human beings. The practice however, has been by many thought _inhuman_, and barbarous, as it must put the poor creatures into no small degree of pain; {80a} but as it is gainful to the owners, in yielding them a far greater quantity of feathers than they would otherwise produce, there is no great prospect of its being very soon, if ever, discontinued. The geese, during the breeding season, are lodged in the same houses with the inhabitants, and even in their very bedchambers. In every apartment are three rows of coarse wicker pens, placed one above another. Each bird has a separate lodge, divided from the other, which it keeps possession of during the time of sitting. A gozzard, or gooseherd, attends the flock, and twice a day drives the whole to water, then brings them back to their habitation, helping those that live in the upper stories to their nests, without ever misplacing a single bird. {80b} Another odd custom in some parts of this same country, is that of preparing _cow-dung_, and converting it into _fuel_, by forming it, in a wet state, into the shape of turf, and afterward drying it in the sun. It yields a strong disagreeable smell in burning, besides its depriving the farmer of a very large quantity of his best manure. Materials for fuel must, surely, have been very scarce in the country when this strange expedient or substitute was first adopted. Marshland and the Fens are not deemed healthy, except, perhaps, to consumptive persons, who are said to be sometimes sent thither on account of the softness of the air. To most others the country is unhealthy, and subject to aguish disorders, which has always been the case, it seems, especially in Marshland; hence an ague is in Norfolk proverbially called _the Marshland Bailiff_, and a person afflicted with that disorder is said to be _arrested by the Bailiff of Marshland_.—Instead of hedgerows the fields are here generally enclosed with deep dikes, which for the most part of the year are filled with water, to which, probably, we are chiefly to ascribe the unhealthiness of the country; or rather to the putrid state of these dikes and stagnant waters, in the latter part of summer and the autumn. {81}