OBITUARY NOTICES. 
419 
were often associated to his mind : — Wicken with Savi’s Warbler, 
Koydon with the Hen-Harrier and Short-eared Owl, and Shouldham 
with the Grasshopper Warbler, and so on. 
A subject which greatly interested him was the topography of 
the Fens. 
As lie was an ardent lover of skating he was able to trace out 
the various systems of fen drainage upon the ice. Having a branch 
business at Peterborough he more than once, the ice favouring, 
made the journey on skates. On another occasion he skated from 
the Nene to the Trent with two of his sons. An account of which 
excursion from his pen will be found in ‘ Fen Skating,’* p. 179. 
The bursting of the Middle Level Sluice on the 6th May, 1872, 
when 20,000 acres of land were flooded by sea-water, constituted 
one of the events of the century in the history of Fen-land. He 
visited the locality several times during the flood, and thus 
describes his visit to the breach in the bank in a row-boat : — 
“ Passing on we became sensible of our near approach to the great breach 
by the current within, and the flood water without the bank, approaching to 
the same level. Arrived at last at the end, we beheld a scene calculated to 
make a life-long impression. It was a gushing out of the water. A rushing, 
boiling, eddying stream, which was filling the Fen country with fearful 
rapidity. Already, almost as far as the eye could reach, the land was 
submerged; only here and there a house, a stack, a shed, and old thorn 
bush with suowy head or a field of tall rape with its yellow blossom, 
appeared above the water.” 
The great pleasure with which lie watched Donati’s Comet in 
the summer and autumn of 1858, evening by evening, remains 
vividly impressed upon my mind. This comet was visible to the 
naked eye for 112 days, from June to October. At its brightest, 
its tail formed an arc of 40°, and during the last named month it 
passed between the earth and Arcturus, a phenomenon which 
impressed all observers. The Leonid Shower (Nov. 1314, 1S66) 
he observed, wrapped in his favourite plaid, as he kept an all-night 
vigil on Lynn Market Tlace, to the great astonishment of the night 
police-men. 
By nature sanguine in temperament he took life very earnestly, 
his pleasures were real, so were his pains. He retained the full use 
of his intellectual faculties to the last. The tragic death of his 
son Alfred, a young man of great promise, who was killed by an 
* * Fen Skating.’ N. & A. Goodman, London 1882. 8vo., with map and 
numerous illustrations. 
