windmills, and the solitary trees, and the black poles of the sluices. Journey where you will, such are the scenes which meet the eye. 'Tis ever the same,—
"The level waste, the rounding grey."
But the rich and prolific soil, dark in colour, and as fine in substance as flour, and when cut deep down into with a spade, like a piece of hard butter, compensates its owners for the entire absence of natural scenery.
Only the combined force of the three Ridings of Yorkshire can outdo it in general results.
At the meeting in connection with the agricultural labourers' movement, held in Exeter Hall towards the close of last year (1872), the Lincolnshire fen district was represented by a labourer, who, in an eloquent speech, described the sufferings of himself and his companions. He admitted that Lincolnshire Fen-men received a money wage higher than other parts of the country, and yet the burden of his speech seemed to be that semi-starvation and debt dogged their footsteps through life. "I remember," he said, "working as a boy for twopence a day, and for years going without stockings to my feet; I remember going hundreds of times to work with a bit of bread and a herring for dinner, having had bread and hot water for breakfast."
During the autumn I was present at an open-air meeting which took place in the dark and in the rain at Croyland, where I believe that I heard the same speaker, together with a fellow-labourer from the Cambridgeshire fens. The latter, in a woe-begone strain, harped on a like string, relating the hardship and misery he and his people had at times endured from want of food, saying bitterly that it would be better if those who professed to feel so much for the labourer would leave off talking about good cottages, education, or sanitary reform, as the one thing needed, and, first of all, give them enough to eat.
Now, as this meeting was composed entirely of labouring people, with a few of the farmers and the tradesmen of the locality—men who knew by a life-long experience the true state of the case—it is evident this Cambridgeshire fen-man would not have made this want of the necessaries of life a leading point in his harangue if
