worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the
possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common
council of the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy
confessor St. Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the
vineyards of Engedi; and, by reason of the privileges granted by the
kings, a city of grace and safety to all who repent."

Does not all this sound like a voice from another planet? It is all
gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it had done
its work, and that the civilization of the fen should be taken up
and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who,
two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward's grand-
daughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought
that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks
did from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks,
for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the
common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built
cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till "out of slough
and bogs accursed he made a garden of pleasure."

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland seem to have done,
besides those firm dykes and rich corn-lands of the Porsand, which
endure unto this day. For within two generations of the Norman
conquest, while the old wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being
replaced by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still standing,
the French abbot of Crowland (so runs the legend) sent French monks
to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman
town of Grante-brigge; whereby--so does all earnest work, however
mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever--
St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, became the