My friend and host drove me one day to see a fen-farm a few miles beyond Ramsey, at which we remained over night and enjoyed the old-fashioned English hospitality of the establishment with lively relish.  It was called “The Four-Hundred-Acre-Farm,” to distinguish it from a hundred others, laid out on the same dead level, with lines and angles as straight and sharp as those of a brick.  You will meet scores of persons in England who speak admiringly of the great prairies of our Western States—­but I never saw one in Illinois as extensive as the vast level expanse you may see in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.  In fact, the space of a large county has been fished up out of a shallow sea of salt water by human labor and capital.  I will not dwell here upon the expense, process, and result of this gigantic operation.  It would require a whole chapter to convey an approximate idea of the character and dimensions of the enterprise.  The feat of Cyrus in turning the current of the Euphrates was the mere making of a short mill-race compared with the labor of lifting up these millions of acres bodily out of the flood that had covered and held them in quiescent solution since the world began.

This Great Prairie of England, generally called here the Fens, or Fenland, would be an interesting and instructive section for the agriculturists of our Western States to visit.  They would see how such a region can be made quite picturesque, as well as luxuriantly productive.  Let them look off upon the green sea from one of the upland waves, and it will be instructive to them to see and know, that all the hedge-trees, groves, and copses that intersect and internect the vast expanse of green and gold were planted by man’s hands.  Such a landscape would convince them that the prairies of Illinois and Iowa may be recovered from their almost depressing monotony by the same means.  The soil of this district is apparently the same as that around Chicago—­black and deep, on a layer of clay.  It pulverises as easily in dry weather, and makes the same inky and sticky composition in wet.  To give it more body, or to cross it with a necessary and supplementary element, a whole field is often trenched by the spade as clean as one could be furrowed by the plough.  By this process the substratum of clay is thrown up, to a considerable thickness, upon the light, black, almost volatile soil, and mixed with it when dry; thus giving it a new character and capacity of production.

Everything seems to grow on a Californian scale in this fen district.  Although the soil thus rescued from the waters that had flooded and half dissolved it, was at first as deep, black, and naturally fertile as that of our prairies, those who commenced its cultivation did not make the same mistake as did our Western farmers.  They did not throw their manure into the broad draining canals to get rid of it, trusting to the inexhaustible fertility of the alluvial earth, as did the wheat