over sea. And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone.
There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giant
Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who, when the
Marshland men (possibly the Romanized inhabitants of the wall
villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle for
a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their
despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seen
a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which
there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the
spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the
dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal
thread which is trickling over the dyke--or worse, through some
forgotten rat's hole in its side--hundreds of men are clustered,
without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers,
fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sake
alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their own
year's bread. The sheep have been driven off the land below; the
cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be
saved in punts, if the worst befall. But a hundred spades, wielded
by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole. The trickle
becomes a rush--the rush a roaring waterfall. The dyke-top trembles-
-gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors in
a wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank will
break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten,
but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder
sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that
again some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed
at instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the
necessity of their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands
which are all below the water level, and where the inner lands, in