THE LAKE VILLAGE 195 



bird-loving reader know the passage? I doubt it, 

 for is there anyone in England, including the stu- 

 dent of the poetry of that period, who can say with 

 his hand on his heart that he has read the whole 

 of Polyolbion — every twelve-foot line of its many 

 thousands, each line laboriously dragging its slow 

 length along? It is hard to read even the hundred 

 lines descriptive of the fens except for the picture 

 conjured up of those marvellous bird gatherings. It 

 was Lincolnshire's boast, according to Drayton, that 

 no such abundance could be seen in any other part 

 of the kingdom. I imagine that there was an even 

 greater abundance and variety in the Somerset lake 

 of prehistoric times. It was a better climate, a more 

 sheltered district, and birds must have been far more 

 numerous in the ages before man found out how to 

 slay them at long distances with guns and to frighten 

 them with smoke and flame and a noise like thunder. 

 Now, with Drayton's picture in my mind and many 

 old memories of immense congregations of wild fowl 

 in the lakes and marshes of a distant region, witnessed 

 in my early years but nevermore to be seen, I could 

 reconstruct the past. Indeed, for a little space, while 

 the infection lasted, I was there afloat on that endless 

 watery wilderness as it appeared to the lake dweller 

 of, say, twenty-five centuries ago. The lake dweller 

 himself was with me, poling and paddling his long 

 canoe by devious ways over the still waters, by miles 

 and leagues of grey rushes and sedges vivid green, 

 and cat's-tail and flowering rush and vast dark bul- 

 rush beds and islets covered with thickets of willow 



