Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London markets, between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they once attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion of railway vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save geese and turkeys, beside the coachman and guard. Full inside and out with such a freight, the proprietors of fast coaches made a great deal more by carrying them than they would have taken by a load of passengers; so the fowls had the preference, while travellers had to take their chance of finding a seat in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning and Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred, and weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were followed on the two succeeding days by half as many more. A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls are among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk famous to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who, startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and common and fen between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at the lumbering flight of the huge bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed in, dismayed, heard the bittern booming among the reeds, or with misgivings of the supernatural saw the fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers, like the creation of some disordered imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home of these and of many another strange creature, is no more, and these species, now chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of natural history. [Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]