"yellow-bellies," who were but a handful of men; but in their place are thousands of human beings who, in spite of agricultural troubles which the drainers of the Fens could not by any means have foreseen, are at least sufficiently clad and fed, and decently housed. It is not always, it is not indeed often, that the reflections appropriate to a scene throng into one's mind when that scene is visited. Sometimes, at the foot of Niagara, for example, thoughts refuse to come into the mind at all; it is only afterwards that with Dickens one reflects, it was surely only afterwards he reflected, that the one abiding impression left by Niagara is the remembrance from time to time that a like mass of water is still falling, and falling, and falling, yesterday to-day and for ever. But, in relation to the Fens, I can truthfully say that most of these thoughts ran through my mind as we rolled along the road. Details of course did not. I had forgotten about Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and Rennie, but I remembered the great deeds of the House of Bedford and boyhood's delight in Hereward. As the road followed the sinuous bank of cabined Ouse, as I looked at the flat fields of rich black soil in which the corn showed green or of pasture springing into life, I felt to realize that on these very places the reeds had whispered and, as Sir Bedivere said to King Arthur, so man might have reported, to Hereward if you will, "Nought heard I, save the waves wap and the waters wan." Each church with its hamlet rose a little above the general level of the plain, making it the easier to understand that each stood on firm ground, once an island among the marshes, upon which the church had set her beacon light. If Downham Church, which we passed, might be taken as a sample--and it may be with safety--then the more leisurely topographers who have gone before are abundantly justified in saying that the churches of the Fen country are of an uncommon stateliness and beauty. This place, by the way, shares with North Walsham the honour of having taken a share in the education of Nelson.