208 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



which all down the coast of Lincolnshire dot these post-tertiary 

 flats. An Indiaman went to pieces on the sands of this one, a 

 lady and her child only being rescued. On a stormy winter, 

 the sea broke in upon the lands of that one, and spread far in- 

 land like a lake, killing every earthworm in the parish, and by 

 their loss greatly injuring the fertility of the corn land. During 

 that winter of apprehension, 1805, when a gun fired at sea by 

 night, or two or three shots heard in the distance by day, set 

 every dweller in the district on the alert through dread of a 

 French invasion, all the waggons of the different farms were 

 numbered and every hand told off, some to fill the carts with 

 household gear, others to drive off sheep and cattle to the up- 

 lands at a moment's notice. The present generation cannot 

 enter into the feverish state of alarm in which its ancestors along 

 these solitary coasts then passed their time, but old men yet 

 tell of it by the ingle nook, and a novelist might find much 

 valuable matter amongst their anecdotes. 



Many more wonders might be mentioned in this district by 

 the sea, the blow-wells, the so-called hut circles, the method of 

 finding plover's eggs, and the like ; but the beck here creeps in 

 premature old age with a somewhat sullen current into a little 

 creek, known as Tetney Lock, where a shabby barge or two 

 lingers idle, not unlike Charon's bark and the tristi palus ina- 

 mabilis undo, of the Styx, and some Hull fishermen are trying 

 to catch eels and dace. It is not a dignified ending to the 

 beck's life. Outside, a few old besoms are stuck up at intervals 

 to mark the channel along a ditch leading through half a league 

 of greasy mud. Beyond it, red waves are flashing into white, 

 ships beating up towards Hull, a tug with its trail of smoke, a 

 gull or two flapping over the mud. Unsavoury and common- 

 place as it all looks, here closes our beck's pilgrimage. At 

 least, it is true to nature. Each stream has its own individuality ; 

 all are not romantic like the Laureate's " Brook," which runs 

 near Somersby in this county. It is not every beck, nor every 



