8o The Last Home 



The result is a triangle of some fifteen or twenty 

 thousand acres or more in which, as in the abyss 

 through which Satan winged his way in search of 

 the newly created world, 



u Where hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, 

 Strove for the mast'ry," 



land and water hold divided empire. In places the 

 water seems at the first glance to be carrying all 

 before it. Broad sheets (some of them a hundred 

 acres or more) spread almost unbroken surfaces over 

 unfathomable depths of mud. But the encircling 

 rings of rushes, dwarf alders, and other multitudinous 

 marsh plants, creep in insidiously, each generation 

 growing rank and dying to make soil on which the 

 next may find a footing for another step inwards. 



The water revenges the encroachment by flooding 

 the land wherever it finds a chance, and undermining 

 when it cannot overflow, till it is impossible to say 

 where the one begins and the other ends. One walks 

 almost dry-shod across what had seemed a dangerous 

 pool, and the next moment sinks over one's fishing 

 stockings in what anywhere else would have been 

 dry land. The confusion of ideas as to the relative 

 solidity of earth and water which results from an hour 

 or two spent in exploring a soft " Broad " marsh is 

 not lessened as one sees the huge brown sail of a 

 " Wherry " the craft which is said to go closer to 

 the wind than any other afloat moving straight up 

 to one, to pass by at eight or nine miles an hour, sail- 

 ing to all appearance on dry ground. The navigable 

 channels are most of them natural cuttings in the 

 dead level of the marsh, invisible at a very few yards' 

 distance. 



The name of the long pole, which is one of the 



