THE LAST ENGLISH HOME OF THE BEARDED TIT 163 



more deep beneath Norfolk turnip-fields and pheasant 

 coverts. 



The fens of the Great Level, which, before Dutch 

 drainers and dyke-builders had reclaimed the second 

 Holland, were perhaps their nearest counterpart in the 

 England of human times, are scarcely less things of the 

 past. The marsh devils, which, until St. Bartholomew 

 interfered and drove them off with a cat-o'-nine-tails, 

 held open court there, and, as Matthew of Paris 

 tells in his Greater Chronicle, came out in troops to 

 maltreat the few hardy Christian settlers who, like 

 St. Guthlac, as penance for past wild lives, sought 

 holy retirement there dragging them, bound, from 

 their cells, and ducking them mercilessly in the black 

 mud, 'coenosis in laticibus atrse paludis' now cower 

 invisible in the ditches, or sneak out as agues, to be 

 ignominiously exorcised with quinine. Hares and 

 Partridges have taken the place of Spoonbills and 

 Bitterns, and Ruffs and Reeves; and, where a few 

 years ago Wild Geese swam, ponderous Shire cart-colts 

 gallop, scarcely leaving in summer a hoof-mark on 

 solid ground. 



The old order almost everywhere has changed and 

 given place to new. But there is a corner left the 

 district of the Broads of Norfolk where one may still 

 see with natural eyes what the world in those parts 

 must have looked like in days before the chalk dam 

 which connected England once with the mainland was 

 happily for Englishmen of these days broken 

 through, snapped by a sudden earthquake, or slowly 



