So the halt was not prolonged and, the rain abating, we started on the drive of forty-five miles roughly for Ely and Cambridge. It took us through the heart of the East Anglian Fens, and the day was one in which the spirit of them entered into me, or perhaps I, having set my mind thereto, entered into their spirit. Of a truth the task was one presenting little difficulty, so far as the general mood was concerned. For me, at any rate, there has never been any real gulf between the useful and the romantic. To one nurtured at the foot of the mighty amphitheatre of the Penrhyn Slate Quarries, scooped out from the heart of a mountain, rising in purple tiers of Cyclopean scale, the work of man, so long as it be grand in outline and in purpose, has always seemed to possess an entrancing beauty of its own. Men live who find the Fens flat and uninteresting. They demand our compassion, by no means our censure or our scorn. One does not despise a blind man because he cannot see; and these men simply suffer from partial blindness, physical and mental. There is, beyond all question, a beauty of the Fens as they are, appealing to the eye alone; they had another beauty for the eye in their original state, original that is to say so far as human history reaches, and of the nature of that original beauty a miniature presentment may be seen still at Wicken Fen, which lies between the Isle of Ely and Newmarket Heath. Happy is the man or woman who can rejoice in both of these aspects of the Fenland. Happier still, because more intelligently charmed, are those who, while they travel through the rich cornland, following the banks of rivers whose waters run at a level higher than those of the surrounding fields, can picture to themselves the scene as it was before the skill and the courage of man made the good wheat grow where the reeds once waved, made firm pasture for sleek cattle out of the quagmire, caused domestic fowls to thrive in the sometime domain of the bittern and the heron. Men never tire of singing the praises of the Dutch who, by dogged courage and centuries of unrelaxing effort, made a country for themselves, a country to which they cling with a love passing the love of women. The conquest of the Fens, begun, so far as we know, by the Romans, was, in its way, an enterprise of equal nobility and courage, and Vermuyden, Francis, Duke of Bedford, and Rennie deserve credit great as any given to any Dutch engineer. The details are perhaps dull; they would certainly be out of place here; the result is grand, a colossal gain for humanity which can best be realized and valued, be admired most cordially and warmly, as one rolls along solid roads where the Fenman of old stalked gingerly on stilts. Who will not remember the last words of Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_, when they are quoted? "Let us send over to Normandy for a fair white stone of Caen, and let us carve a tomb worthy of thy grand-parents." "And what shall we write thereon?"