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almost of the hue of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote; a
distant church rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I
see low wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the
south, I see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual
city-- the smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the
east lie the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an interminable fen;
but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of sky, with great
cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but all the colour of the
landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to the eye, which gives it an
intensity of emerald hue that I have seen nowhere else in the world.
There is a sense of deep peace about it all, the herb of the field just

rising in its place over the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy
fragrance, as of hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent and
remote lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great pastures,
going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the winter it is
fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees are leafless now;
and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most delicate and spare
tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing bent, the pale stubble, the
rich plough-land, all blending into a subdued colour; and then, as the
day declines and the plain is rimmed with a frosty mist, the
smouldering glow of the orange sunset begins to burn clear on the
horizon, the grey laminated clouds becoming ridged with gold and
purple, till the whole fades, like a shoaling sea, into the purest green,
while the cloud-banks grow black and ominous, and far-off lights
twinkle like stars in solitary farms.
Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better; it was
built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a shooting-box. I have
often thought that it must have been ordered from the Army and Navy
Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated, and there has been a pathetic
feeling after giving it a meanly Gothic air; it is ill-placed, shut in by
trees, approached only by a very dilapidated farm-road; and the worst
of it is that a curious and picturesque house was destroyed to build it. It
stands in what was once a very pretty and charming little park, with an
ancient avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see the old
terraces of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the
grass-grown pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard
of honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a Roman fort;
for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the handle of a fine
old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with plaster, with two pretty
laughing faces pinched lightly out under the volutes. A few days after I
felt like Polycrates of Samos, that over-fortunate tyrant, when, walking
myself in my garden, I descried and gathered up the rest of the same
handle, the fractures 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,