164 THE LAST ENGLISH HOME 



mined by countless generations of boring shellfish, 

 until it gave way under the weight of the accumulating 

 waters of the estuary, choked to the north by advancing 

 ice, or tilted westward by some submarine upheaval. 

 There, with a very small stretch of imagination, one 

 may still hear mastodons crashing through the reed- 

 beds, and British hippopotami splashing and blowing 

 in the pools ; and, as every now and then an incautious 

 footstep breaks through the raft-like upper crust of 

 soil, and imprisoned gases bubble up, one may, without 

 any stretch of imagination, smell the foul stenches of 

 Pliocene days. 



The climate in those days, geologists tell us, judging 

 by the fossil plants of the time, must before the 

 country was wrapped in ice have been much what it 

 is in Norfolk now. 'If the various sections of the 

 upper fresh-water beds are examined, we find,' writes 

 Mr. Clement Reid, who surveyed the country round 

 Croiner, where the Forest Beds are most exposed, ' that 

 all appear to have been formed in large shallow lakes 

 like the present Broads, or in sluggish streams con- 

 nected with them.' 



Three considerable rivers, the Bure, the Waveney, 

 and the Yare, after meandering through level meadows 

 and marshes none of the three, according to Sir John 

 Hawkshaw's estimate, with a fall of more than two 

 inches in the mile join and meet the full strength of 

 the tide in Breydon Water. 



The outflow is checked, and the volume of the 

 streams, finding no other way to dispose of itself, has 



