The chalybeate waters of Thetford were known so early as 1714, and were slightly tinged with iron and moderately tonic. Arising from springs on the north bank of the Upper Ouse, they were in local repute long before the necessity arose for every medical man to have his pet curative resort, and might have remained obscure had it not been for one Professor Accum, who, as an early nineteenth-century boomster, began to send patients to Thetford, long before that century was out of its teens. Thetford rose to the occasion. In 1818 the Mayor at his own expense constructed a river-side path leading to the “Spring House,” and planted it with those plane-trees which have grown into the delightful avenue that now forms his best monument. In August of that year the spring was opened to the “free and unrestricted use of the poor,” and the sick, and large numbers of all classes flocked to it. Still larger numbers were attracted in 1819, when Professor Accum published a work on the virtues of the Thetford waters. Success seemed assured. The water was even bottled and sent, carefully packed, to all parts, as a panacea for dyspepsia; but it was when these springs failed to cure ophthalmia, rheumatism and broken bones, and to work other impossibilities, that failure came and fond hopes withered and decayed. The public expected miracles, but there has been nothing of a miraculous nature in East Anglia since the marvellous times of Edmund, King, Martyr, and Saint, when credulity, faith, and the imagination of the monks went hand in hand, and produced astounding results; and so the Thetford Spa presently ceased to be. Even those dyspeptic patients who derived, or thought they derived, benefit from the bottled waters fell away when they found they had long been humbugged by a number of practical humorists, who, combining a hateful cynicism with an abominable laziness, bottled off their healing draughts from other and handier, but quite ineffective, places. Thetford at this day shows no prominent signs of its old Spa. The “Bath,” or “Spring,” house remains, but it is now a private residence, and few know or care to enquire, the origin of that beautiful plane-tree avenue leading beside the river to the “Nuns’ Bridges.” Thetford in these times of ours is a very sober place indeed, has given up all attempts to attract the fashionables, and relies for its prosperity upon Burrell’s engineering works, where you can buy a beautiful traction-engine any day, and upon the Pulp Mills, which turn out unbreakable domestic articles in a wholesale manner calculated to make all interested in the manufacture of china and glass wish they had chosen some other trade.