The Face of the Wilderness 285 



an open and shining lake. Village sliding-pools 

 appear again by the wayside, where no child of 

 the present generation has seen them ; and in 

 innumerable places in the lowland and stream- 

 side meadows, and in the steep clefts of hills, 

 the water returns to its ancient and unsuspected 

 channels to show how powerful an influence it 

 once exercised over the formation of the land- 

 scapes of to-day. 



There is a peculiar fascination in standing on the 

 slight rise in the modern meadows or cornfields 

 that forms the limit of the flood, and seeing the 

 ancient face of the land made plain once more 

 through the veil of centuries of civilization. The 

 very slope at our feet, which seems so unreal and 

 casual a shore-line, is little by little seen to be no 

 mere sudden freak of last night's winds and waters, 

 but the ancient boundary of the marsh before it 

 was tamed. The hedges and fences, that at other 

 times form the cardinal features of the landscape, 

 are now conspicuously new, and feebly superimposed 

 on something enduring and more real. Along the 

 slight slope on which we stand the expanse of 

 water is embayed, as far as we can see, in grey 

 bights and dim green headlands, where plovers 

 and a few gale-driven seagulls have already re- 

 peopled, as if by ancestral instinct, the shores of 

 this dream-like sea. Following the strand for a, 

 mile or two among the dividing hedgerows, we shall 

 probably observe how many of the farms and 

 hamlets are built just at its margin, and fall as 

 naturally into the restoration of the ancient land- 



