Kitabı oku: «Prose Idylls, New and Old», sayfa 6

But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men.  Hermits, driven by that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls.  Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediæval man for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed.

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf’s ‘History of Crowland’ (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet.  Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf and his continuator, ‘Peter of Blois;’ and though their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of the men of old.

Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge.

There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac (‘The Battle-Play,’ the ‘Sport of War’), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old ‘law,’ as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood?  But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went well to the end.

There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and fire—‘Develen and luther gostes’—such as tormented likewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasure hoards; how they ‘filled the house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere.  They were in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses’ tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with such immoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all between heaven and earth resounded with their voices.  And they tugged and led him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters.  After that they brought him into the wild places of the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was torn.  After that they took him and beat him with iron whips; and after that they brought him on their creaking wings between the cold regions of the air.’

But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend.  You may read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he fed them after their kind.  How the ravens tormented him, stealing letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him, discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint’s hand, now on his shoulder, now on his knee.  And how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat, Guthlac made answer, ‘Know you not that he who hath led his life according to God’s will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw the more near.’

After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and starvation, no wonder if St. Guthlac died.  They buried him in a leaden coffin (a grand and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had been sent to him during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over his sacred and wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there rose a chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crowland fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with seven bells, which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich with the gifts of Danish Vikings and princes, and even with twelve white bear-skins, the gift of Canute’s self; while all around were the cottages of the corrodiers, or folk who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their heirs.

But within these four rivers, at least, was neither tyranny nor slavery.  Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac’s peace from cruel lords must keep his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe while they did so; for between those four rivers St. Guthlac and his abbot were the only lords, and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king, nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter ‘the inheritance of the Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minster free from worldly servitude; the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of anyone in worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common council of the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St. Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi; and by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a city of grace and safety to all who repent.’

Does not all this sound—as I said just now—like a voice from another planet?  It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it had done its work, and that the civilization of the fen should be taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward’s granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till ‘out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of pleasure.’

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day.  For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby—so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever—St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St. Guthlac’s death.

The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years slowly, and often disastrously.  Great mistakes were made; as when a certain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from Littleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests’-houses), and found, to his horror and that of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered—such little of them as could be drained at all—for nigh two hundred years.  Honour, meanwhile, to another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the great learn from Guyhirn—the last place at which one could see a standing gallows, and two Irish reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn for the sake of hidden treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings and a few silver spoons.

The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of the fens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries.  The state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to these fen-lands.  No one can read the account of their debts, neglect, malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing that the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands dry must have suffered, as did everything else belonging to the convents.

It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth’s reign that the recovery of these ‘drowned lands’ was proceeded with once more; and during the first half of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work done, as all work is done in this world, not as well as it should have been done, but at least done.

To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans; to take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer or a fen-man.  Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers—more than one Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at their head—trying to start a great scheme for draining the drowned ‘middle level’ east of the Isle of Ely.  How they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the ‘Lynn Law’ of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called ‘Pretended Ordinance’ of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.’s Government were content to call it ‘pretended’ and let it stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford, added, in 1649, to his father’s ‘old Bedford River’ that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and ‘washes,’ i.e. waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and so forth,—all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the histories of the fens.

Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half written—indeed, only hinted at—the mixed population of the fens.

The sturdy old ‘Girvii,’ ‘Gyrwas,’ men of the ‘gyras’ or marshes, who in Hereward’s time sang their three-man glees, ‘More Girviorum tripliciter canentes,’ had been crossed with the blood of Scandinavian Vikings in Canute’s conquest; crossed again with English refugees from all quarters during the French conquest under William.  After the St. Bartholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France—dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, whose names and physiognomies are said still to remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney.  Then came Vermuyden’s Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them.  After the battle of Dunbar another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed by Cromwell’s Government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men to this day.  Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come down into the fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit their expatriated kinsmen.

To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more than even the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, we may attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for now nigh three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdy independence and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town, to seek their fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea.  And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone.  There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who, when the Marshland men (possibly the Romanized inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle for a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth.  No one has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal thread which is trickling over the dyke—or worse, through some forgotten rat’s hole in its side—hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer’s sake alone, but for the sake of their own year’s labour and their own year’s bread.  The sheep have been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the worst befall.  But a hundred spades, wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole.  The trickle becomes a rush—the rush a roaring waterfall.  The dyke-top trembles—gives.  The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors in a wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank will break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten, but not conquered.  A new cry rises among them.  Up, to save yonder sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the necessity of their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below the water level, and where the inner lands, in many cases, are lower still than those outside.

So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the teams are harnessed, the waggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go round cheerily, and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so much depends.  As for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through the breach pours a roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside of the bank, which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come.  Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope.  Be it so, then.  At the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the water out; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, the same everlasting fight with wind and wave which their forefathers have waged for now 800 years.

He who sees—as I have seen—a sight like that, will repine no more that the primæval forest is cut down, the fair mere drained.  For instead of mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times more numerous than all the wild venison of the primæval jungle; and produces crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and more—it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived—and if they will, more virtuous and more happy—than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit in his cell.  So we, who knew the deep fen, will breathe one sigh over the last scrap of wilderness, and say no more; content to know that—

 
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’
 

IV
MY WINTER GARDEN. ⁵

So, my friend: you ask me to tell you how I contrive to support this monotonous country life; how, fond as I am of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, literature, I go cheerfully through the daily routine of a commonplace country profession, never requiring a six-weeks’ holiday; not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spend a day in London; having never yet actually got to Paris.

You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose talk is of bullocks—as indeed mine is, often enough; why I am not by this time ‘all over blue mould;’ why I have not been tempted to bury myself in my study, and live a life of dreams among old books.

I will tell you.  I am a minute philosopher: though one, thank Heaven, of a different stamp from him whom the great Bishop Berkeley silenced—alas! only for a while. I am possibly, after all, a man of small mind, content with small pleasures.  So much the better for me.  Meanwhile, I can understand your surprise, though you cannot understand my content.  You have played a greater game than mine; have lived a life, perhaps more fit for an Englishman; certainly more in accordance with the taste of our common fathers, the Vikings, and their patron Odin ‘the goer,’ father of all them that go ahead.  You have gone ahead, and over many lands; and I reverence you for it, though I envy you not.  You have commanded a regiment—indeed an army, and ‘drank delight of battle with your peers;’ you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment, like a noble Englishman as you are, old friend, among thousands who never knew before what justice and judgment were.  You have tasted (and you have deserved to taste) the joy of old David’s psalm, when he has hunted down the last of the robber lords of Palestine.  You have seen ‘a people whom you have not known, serve you.  As soon as they heard of you, they obeyed you; but the strange children dissembled with you:’ yet before you, too, ‘the strange children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts.’

Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do not wonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and given power to carry it through, all smaller work must seem paltry; that such a man’s very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that free adventurous Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all the self-help and daring of a man, should have been on a par with your work; that when you go a sporting, you ask for no meaner preserve than the primæval forest, no lower park wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya.

Yes; you have been a ‘burra Shikarree’ as well as a ‘burra Sahib.’  You have played the great game in your work, and killed the great game in your play.  How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to death, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty years ago?  How many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of elephant or buffalo?  How many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or wary old alligators, their craws full of poor girls’ bangles?  Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript up by boars?  Have you not seen face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep—primæval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth?  Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules, full of slain monsters.  Your brains must be one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme.  And therefore I like to think of you.  I try to picture your feelings to myself.  I spell over with my boy Mayne Reid’s amusing books, or the ‘Old Forest Ranger,’ or Williams’s old ‘Tiger Book,’ with Howitt’s plates; and try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read and imagine, feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, ‘a great disposition to cry.’

For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were full of bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, which I shall never see; for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my bread in a very quiet way; that England was to be henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose to make it: and I have made it, by Heaven’s help, the latter.

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this little England—or rather, this little patch of moor in which I have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do—looked at moments rather like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would sigh, ‘Oh! that I had wings’—not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle there—but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as altogether unwholesome and undesirable.  But the thirst for adventure and excitement was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one.  Others went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the glorious old worlds of the East—why should not I?  Others rambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and palaces, filling their minds with fair memories—why should not I?  Others discovered new wonders in botany and zoology—why should not I?  Others too, like you, fulfilled to the utmost that strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes my pulse throb as often as I see the stags’ heads in our friend A—’s hall: why should not I?  It is not learnt in a day, the golden lesson of the Old Collect, to ‘love the thing which is commanded, and desire that which is promised.’  Not in a day: but in fifteen years one can spell out a little of its worth; and when one finds one’s self on the wrong side of forty, and the first grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can no longer jump as high as one’s third button—scarcely, alas! to any button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings, one’s lower limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old post-horse’s, why, one makes a virtue of necessity: and if one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for wonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on the lawn and the brook in the park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one ‘Tour autour de mon jardin.’

For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our minds of that tyrannous phantom of size.  Only recollect that great and small are but relative terms; that in truth nothing is great or small, save in proportion to the quantity of creative thought which has been exercised in making it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stonehenge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge together, though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet.  You differ from me?  Be it so.  Even if you prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do otherwise.  If you rob me of my faith in ‘minute philosophy,’ you rob me of a continual source of content, surprise, delight.

So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, and playing with all his might, in his own place and way.  Remember only, that though I never can come round to your sphere, you must some day come round to me, when wounds, or weariness, or merely, as I hope, a healthy old age, shall shut you out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether human or quadruped.—For you surely will not take to politics in your old age?  You will not surely live to solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas! did but last year) the votes, not even of the people, but merely of the snobocracy, on the ground of your having neither policy nor principles, nor even opinions, upon any matter in heaven or earth?—Then in that day will you be forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many a year; to refrain your soul, and keep it low.  You will see more and more the depth of human ignorance, the vanity of human endeavours.  You will feel more and more that the world is going God’s way, and not yours, or mine, or any man’s; and that if you have been allowed to do good work on earth, that work is probably as different from what you fancy it as the tree is from the seed whence it springs.  You will grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of your labours; because if you saw it you would probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God would not be very good in yours; content, also, to receive your discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God is working and fighting, whether you are in hospital or in the field.  And with this growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on you a respect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and my little tours about that moorland which I call my winter-garden, and which is to me as full of glory and of instruction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to you, and in which I contrive to find as much health and amusement as I have time for—and who ought to have more?

I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal sense (for only in a few acres have I a life interest), but in that higher sense in which ten thousand people can own the same thing, and yet no man’s right interfere with another’s.  To whom does the Apollo Belvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to see its beauty?  So does my winter-garden; and therefore to me among the rest.

Besides (which is a gain to a poor man) my pleasure in it is a very cheap one.  So are all those of a minute philosopher, except his microscope.  But my winter-garden, which is far larger, at all events, than that famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny in keeping up.  Poor, did I call myself?  Is it not true wealth to have all I want without paying for it?  Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royal personages, planting and improving for me?  Is it not more than royal wealth to have sun and frost, Gulf-stream and south-westers, laws of geology, phytology, physiology, and other ologies—in a word, the whole universe and the powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting, colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go to work?

Yes.  I am very rich, as every man may be who will.  In the doings of our little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written down.  In the words of those whose talk is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work them out.  In fifteen miles of moorland I find the materials of all possible physical science, and long that I had time to work out one smallest segment of that great sphere.  How can I be richer, if I have lying at my feet all day a thousand times more wealth than I can use?

Some people—most people—in these run-about railway days, would complain of such a life, in such a ‘narrow sphere,’ so they call it, as monotonous.  Very likely it is so.  But is it to be complained of on that account?  Is monotony in itself an evil?  Which is better, to know many places ill, or to know one place well?  Certainly—if a scientific habit of mind be a gain—it is only by exhausting as far as possible the significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that sentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you can discover any glimpse of the significance of the universal.  Even men of boundless knowledge, like Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, their pet subject, or they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all.  The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos.  I learn more, studying over and over again the same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should by roaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders.  Fifteen years have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at a few of the answers.  What sawed out the edges of the moors into long narrow banks of gravel?  What cut them off all flat atop?  What makes Erica Tetralix grow in one soil, and the bracken in another?  How did three species of Club-moss—one of them quite an Alpine one—get down here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel?  Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria settle in the only square yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to its native sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfortable?  Why did Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at least two hundred years a farm-yard gateway?  Why does it generally rain here from the south-west, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to rise again?  Why—why is everything, which lies under my feet all day long?  I don’t know; and you can’t tell me.  And till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so to create novelty at every turn.