78 The Last Home 



o' Groat's, rolling down in its sluggish current stumps 

 of trees and bones of elephants and bears and 

 beavers, to be washed long ages afterwards from the 

 " Forest Beds " of Sheringham and Runton. 



The swamps through which the old estuary once 

 cut its way lie buried now in places a hundred feet 

 and 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, " ccenosis in laticibus 

 atrse paludis" now cower invisible in the ditches, 

 or sneak out as agues, to be ignominously 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 main- 

 land was happily for Englishmen of these days 



