196 WILD-FOWL AND SEA-FOWL OF GREAT BRITAIN 



real marsh-dwellers were here agreed that "such 

 things were best let alone for them as understood 

 'em ; they didn't." 



Yet when the call was made on the rough wild 

 marshes " for Queen and Country," they stepped 

 to the front as their fathers had done in the time 

 of the first and great Napoleon. I knew many old 

 soldiers and sailors, when I was in my teens, who 

 reckoned it their proudest boast that they "had 

 helped leather Old Boney." I never heard the 

 great general, or rather emperor, mentioned with 

 his full name or title ; he was to them, and always 

 had been, Old Boney. 



Just a sketch, let me give, of a coyman's house, 

 before local government and sanitary measures were 

 thought about. A long, low, one-storied building, 

 the thick walls discoloured with all the stains that 

 the foul vapours of the flats can stain with, built of 

 rubble, that is, whatever they could lay their hands 

 on to build with, by fair means or foul. It was 

 old, heavily thatched with reeds, the most durable 

 of thatching, and as it had been renewed from 

 time to time without taking the old off, the thatch 

 was as thick as the walls, cool in the marsh-land 

 summers, and as warm in the bitter winters as any 

 house built in such a place could be expected to 

 be. The windows were lead-light ones, a fixed 

 light and a casement to each opening, heavy oak 

 shutters protecting them at night, secured from 

 within. Some rough flags a little raised kept the 

 inhabitants' feet from sinking into the squash of 



