On the tenth of May in the year sixteen hundred and twenty-seven, I rode from Temple Belwood to Crowle, as blithe and merry as any young fellow in the world. For one thing, the day was the finest of an early season, the air sweet with spring odours and glad with pleasant sounds. The laburnums and lilacs and hawthorn and the foreign chestnuts (in blossom for the first time at Temple Belwood that year) were full of bloom. The hen-pheasants were whistling to their new-hatched broods; the fresh-shorn sheep were answering the bleating of their lambs; trees and bushes rang with the melody of small birds, and from the holms and islets of marsh and mere came a din of quacking, clanging, and chattering water-fowl, which distance mingled and softened into music. But what a pother I make! It was a fine spring day in Axholme. The great reason for gladness was that I had received good news--news of hard won victory from my father, then in London. For years the Isle had been threatened with invasion by one Cornelius Vermuijden, a Dutchman, who had induced the King to grant him authority to drain the meres, embank and stop the rivers of the Isle, and transform the country at his pleasure, regardless of the rights of the Isle Commoners covenanted in the Deed of Earl Mowbray. When the Dutchman had completed his precious scheme, one third of the land reclaimed was to become the property of the King, another to be Vermuijden's, and the remaining third to be divided among the Commoners of the Isle, that is, the land-owners. This, without the consent of the land-owners, be it understood, and in nowise considering the ruin certain to befall hundreds of poorer folk, who lived by fishing, fowling, reed-cutting, egg-gathering, and the like crafts of marshmen.