Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/58

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The epithet of "fill-dyke," applied to the month of February, carries us back to a time when the undrained land lay sodden after the winter rains and every watercourse was filled to overflowing by the melting of the snow. A chilly, damp, cheerless England of agues and marsh-fevers it was, but not without its picturesque features, of which the march of improvement has spared us but scant trace in the fen-levels of Cambridgeshire and in the Broad District of Norfolk. It is a land of wide-stretching horizons, compared with which the skies of hilly and mountainous districts seem strangely circumscribed, and your true fenman would not exchange his quiet waters, in their gay setting of yellow flags, arrowhead and flowering-rush, for the livelier humours of North Country trout-stream or Highland torrent. To drink in the spirit of the land, its wide spaciousness and peaceful stillness, we must traverse the vast marsh-pastures, fed over by numberless horses and cattle, amongst which glide the brown sails of boats which move on unseen waterways, or stand in the midst of the one stretch of untamed fen still left to us, whence the towers of Ely cathedral are seen vast and dim to the northward. Elsewhere, only the pumping-station—engine-house or wind-mill—with the straight silver line of the "lode" or "level" into which it pours its contribution of surface waters, shows how much of the black land, now so firm and dry, and bearing