DICKLEBURGH, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing. They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground, industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion, than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase; only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in especial, has become almost deserted. [Illustration: DICKLEBURGH.]