Sometimes the firmer ground he came to was as brilliant as old carpets from the house of an Eastern king. The yellow broom moss was maturing, and bright chestnut-coloured capsules curved among it. The wild thyme crisped under his feet. The fairy down of the cotton grass floated round them. Little tufts of pale sea-lavender nestled among the long leaves of the marsh zostera, plump, rank, and full of moisture. The fox-tail grass and the cat's-tail grass flourished everywhere. We of to-day can have but a faint idea of that wonderful and luxuriant carpet over which he trod. The fair yellow corn now stands straight and tall over those solitudes. The broad dyke cut deep in the brown peat now straightly cleaves the fen, still beautiful and rich in life, but changed for ever from its ancient magic. By night the lone sprites of the marsh with their ghostly lamps flit disconsolate, for the hand of man has come and tamed that teeming wilderness which was once so strange and alien from Man. Man was not wanted there in those old days, and the cruel swamps claimed a life-sacrifice as the price of their invasion. Hyla's hard brown feet were all stained by the living carpet on which they walked. His advancing tread broke down the great vivid crimson balls of the _agaricus fungus_, and split its fat milk-white stem into creamy flakes. The crimson poison painted his instep, and the bright orange chanterelle mingled its harmless juice with that of its deadly cousin. His ankles were powdered with the dull pink-white of the hydnum, that strong mushroom on which they say the hedgehog feeds greedily at midnight, the tiny fruit of the "witches' butter" crumbled at his touch. Over all, the fierce dragon-fly swung its mailed body, the Geoffroi of the fen insects. The light and shadow sweeping over the wheat in its ordered planting are beautiful, but Hyla saw what we can never see in England more, saw with his steadfast, regardless eyes more natural beauties than we can ever see again. In every clump of reeds that fringed the pool, he came suddenly upon some old pike basking in the sun, like a mitred bishop in his green and gold. The green water flags trembled as he sunk away. The herons paddled in the shallow pools, and tossed the little silver fish from them to each other, the cold-eyed hawk dropped like a shooting star, and fought the stoat for his new-killed prey. The shadows lengthened and lay in patches over the wild world of water. The blue mists began to rise from a hundred pools, and the bats to flicker through them. The sunlight faded rapidly away, the world became greyish ochre colour, then grey, a soft cobweb grey, through which fell the hooting of an owl, and the last call of a plover.