Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/134

 *intended, we learnt, for a salmon, as the inn was called the "Swan and Salmon." We felt duly grateful for the lettered information, otherwise we might in our ignorance have imagined the sign to be the "Swan and Big Pike"!

Now we passed through a pretty but apparently sparsely-populated country; indeed, it is strange how little the presence of man is revealed in some portions of rural England, though the signs of his labour are everywhere in evidence. Upon one occasion, when driving a prominent American citizen, a guest of mine, across country (in order that he might behold it from another point of view than that afforded by a railway carriage, the general mode of seeing strange countries nowadays), I took the opportunity of asking him what he was most struck with in the English landscape. "Its uninhabited look," was the prompt reply; "and that is the very last thing I expected. I see great parks here and there, and now and then I get a peep of a lordly palace standing in stately solitude therein, as though it needs must keep as far removed from the plebeian outer world as possible; but the homes of the people (I mean those who are neither very rich nor very poor), where do they hide themselves? From all I have seen to-day, had I not known the facts, I should have imagined it was Old England that was the new and thinly-populated land, and not my American State. With you, I guess, it is a civilised feudalism that still prevails: the palace surrounded by its park takes the place of the ancient castle surrounded by its moat—the outer forms