fitting exactly.  There are traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks.  Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made.  There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago!  But there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile away, where the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man hoeing brought up a bronze spear-head.  He took it to the lord of the manor, who was interested in curiosities.  The squire hurried to the place and had it all dug out carefully; quite a number of spear-heads were found, and a beautiful bronze sword, with the holes where the leather straps of the handle passed in and out.  I have held this fine blade in my hands, and it is absolutely undinted.  It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier.  Nothing else was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that looked like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the edge of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were presumably unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the attempt.  Hard by is the place where the great fight related in Hereward the Wake took place.  The Normans were encamped southwards at Willingham, where a line of low entrenchments is still known as Belsar’s Field, from Belisarius, the Norman Duke in command.  It is a quiet enough place now, and the yellow-hammers sing sweetly and sharply in the thick thorn hedges.  The Normans made a causeway of faggots and earth across the fen, but came at last to the old channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge; and here they attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were foiled by Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed.  There still broods for me a certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined channel now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod, between its high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.

But to return to my house.  It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.  There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a strip of pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust of mortar and chips of brick, where another old wall stood.  There was a great pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box, and the garden is still full of old carved stones, lintels, and mullions, and capitals of pillars, and a grotesque figure of a bearded man, with a tunic confined round the waist by a cord, which crowns one of my rockeries.  But it is all gone now, and the pert cockneyfied house stands up among the shrubberies and walnuts, surveying the ruins of what has been.