fat eels wherewith the clergy of Ely or of Crowland might turn a fast in the letter into a feast in the spirit. With his stilts and his leaping pole he could travel over the marshes with the most astonishing celerity; but that he enjoyed his life so keenly as Kingsley would have us believe is in the last degree unlikely. Still the Fenman knew the life, and he knew his powers. He had no ambition to drive the slow oxen, to turn the fertile furrow, to garner the golden grain. Indifferent to questions of national welfare he was, as of course. The rustic of to-day is absolutely indifferent to considerations of the kind. He likes to see the straw so heavy that it cannot be cut by machines, laid by storms so that the sickle must needs be employed, because that means more work for men. Time was, and that not so very long ago, when, following the example of the artisans and weavers of manufacturing England, Hodge rioted and broke up the thrashing machines and the like, which did the work of twenty men and more. "It stands to reason," he used to say, "that such newfangled notions are bad for the likes of us." It stood to reason, from the Fenman's point of view, that to drain the Fens would be to leave him without the only occupation for which he was fit; it probably never occurred to him that he might adapt himself to altered circumstances and become a regular worker, tied to fixed hours, instead of an amphibious wanderer, fowling and fishing when he pleased, or when necessity drove him to exertion. Who shall blame him? Certainly not the sportsman, the naturalist, or the botanist, who have felt a pang of regret as they have watched, elsewhere than in the Fens it may be, the marsh that always held snipe, from which the bittern has been known to rise, in the recesses of which some almost extinct herb survived, converted into a fruitful field. Yet what man familiar with the life of the country has not felt these regrets, even while he knew all the time that the change was for the public good and that his own livelihood would not be directly affected? Is it possible, then, not to sympathize with the resistance of the Fenmen, who knew nothing of "the public good" and saw their livelihood, or the chance of obtaining it, destroyed before their helpless eyes. It was the old story. One man's meat is another man's poison all the world over and for all time; and there can be no progress, no wholesale and beneficial change in the ways of life, without much incidental tribulation. Nevertheless, when all things are weighed in the balance, not a scintilla of doubt remains that the draining of the Fens was begun and continued, as the old knight in _Hereward the Wake_ said, "by the inspiration of God." It banished a few birds; but we could better spare a few kinds of birds than preserve them with the fevers and the agues which were the inseparable accident of their haunts. It was the end of the "slodgers" and the