Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/236

 *—is the finest and most wonderful in the world. It is worth a long journey to the district if only to behold one of its gorgeous sunsets, when you look upon a moist atmosphere saturated with colour so that it becomes opalescent, and the sinking sun seen through the vibrating air is magnified to twice its real size as it sets in a world of melting rubies and molten gold: from the western slopes of far-off California I have looked down upon the sun dipping into the wide Pacific amidst a riot of colour, but nothing like this! It is not always necessary to leave England in search of the strange and beautiful; the more I travel abroad, the more I am convinced of this!

It almost seemed to us, as we drove along, that somehow we must be travelling in a foreign land, so un-English and unfamiliar did the prospect appear! I have long studied the scenery of Mars through the telescope, have in the silent hours of the night wandered thus over the mighty, water-intersected plains of that distant planet, and had only the vegetation of the Fens been red instead of green, we might in imagination well have fancied ourselves touring in Mars! Truly this may be considered a rather too far-fetched phantasy, but as Bernard Barton, the East Anglian poet, says—

There is a pleasure now and then, in giving Full scope to Fancy and Imagination.

Then suddenly, so suddenly as to be almost startling, one of those scenic revelations and surprises that this singular land abounds in, took place. Low down