Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/284

 Scawfell. But this may be due to the suggestion that it is a miniature of the Alps. I appeal, therefore, to the Fen Country, the country of which Alton Locke's farmer boasted that it had none of your 'darned ups and downs' and 'was as flat as his barn-door for forty miles on end.' I used to climb the range of the Gogmagogs, to see the tower of Ely, some sixteen miles across the dead level, and I boasted that every term I devised a new route for walking to the cathedral from Cambridge. Many of these routes led by the little public-house called 'Five Miles from Anywhere': which in my day was the Mecca to which a remarkable club, called—from the name of the village—the 'Upware Republic,' made periodic pilgrimages. What its members specifically did when they got there beyond consuming beer is unknown to me; but the charm was in the distance 'from anywhere'—a sense of solitude under the great canopy of the heavens, where, like emblems of infinity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

I have always loved walks in the Fens. In a steady march along one of the great dykes by the monotonous canal with the exuberant vegetation