NEWMARKET 177 



Greater Britain delineated and chucked in. May 

 not somebody bring out a popular chart at popular 

 price for folk to consult while on the spot, and 

 take home for future reference? Here is oppor- 

 tunity for satisfying a long-felt want. The cost 

 of production would be slight, and surely a 

 constant sale be assured — if the price was right. 

 Half Newmarket knows very little of its own 

 surroundings, and it is precious little denizens in 

 the "parts about" can tell you of villages only a 

 little way off, comparatively speaking, and that 

 though the labourers are a quick-walking race, 

 thanks to two fine sports, poaching and skating. 

 Some readers, I daresay, have been in and 

 admired Icklingham, a typical long Suffolk village 

 — flint, brick, mud, plaster, and thatch-built 

 principally, with here and there a good house, 

 everybody apparently well-to-do, and the elder 

 women — the men do not show it — bearing the 

 Fen mark, the darkness under the skin which used 

 to go with intermittent fevers and agues. Here- 

 abouts is a tract of miserably poor scrub-land 

 inhabited by rabbits, who eat all its flesh, which 

 is grass and the heather, down to the bone, and 

 polish up the remains so close that on a hot day 

 you can't walk because the surface of the vegeta- 

 tion left over the sandy soil is like a slide. You 

 may meet someone, again you may not, most 

 likely not, as you range about an object of 

 curiosity to the wheatears, whose brilliant white 

 skirts make them a mark as far as the eye can 

 carry as they skim about. Near the river, which 

 makes a wedge of fen in the sandy waste, sand- 

 pipers breed and greet your advance with whistles 

 in their own singular minor key. Just a few 

 thrushes lope about, and I had the pleasure of a 



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