(Gye =) 
CHAPTER XX. 
WICKEN FEN. 
Wuo has not at some time or other turned his thoughts towards 
the Fens? Who has not felt himself impelled to explore their historical 
and still interesting fastnesses, the refuge once of Hereward and the last 
of the Saxons; the refuge, in later days, of a different, but perhaps to 
the naturalist a not less attractive, race of beings—the Bittern, the Black 
Tern, the Black-tailed Godwit, and the Ruff? 
It was not, however, with any hope of meeting with either of these 
rarities—which, if they then visited the place at all, did so only as stragglers 
on migration—that, on a glorious morning at the end of May, I set out 
from Cambridge, in company with three other kindred spirits, to see 
what bird-life could still be met with in this once famous district. I 
had often been sold before; often plodded gaily along to some place marked 
on the map as Fen ‘‘So-and-so,” and as often returned worn out and 
disgusted, and inclined only to curse the march of civilization with all 
its hideous paraphernalia of dykes and causeways. I had reached my goal, 
and found it not, as I had fondly anticipated, a mass of sedge and water, 
but perhaps an ordinary green meadow sparsely sprinkled with a few 
decayed willows, or, worse still, an every-day sort of cornfield, differing 
little from its fellows, except that the soil was darker and heavier to walk 
upon. 
On this occasion, however, there was no fear of disappointment. We were 
going to Wicken Fen, and had learnt from one who had visited the locality 
in person that we should at last see a genuine piece of fenland, undefiled 
by either railroad or ploughshare, and probably much the same as it had 
been a couple of centuries ago. We trained to Waterbeach, and intended 
to drive thence to the Fen. The route was easy to follow, as it led along the 
river all the way, but the only conveyance obtainable was a seedy-looking 
dogeart, drawn by a horse named, presumably in derision, ‘* Wildfire ’’— 
a quadruped which looked as if, on a good road and pursued by wolves, it 
might perhaps have managed six miles an hour—and died after it. The road 
