Why there they are, lying overlooked at our
feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings
clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing
a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell
of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one
great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag
waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the
kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be
plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may
listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp,
and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its
ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if
it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise
away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If
they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a
chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage
will be less problematical than here.
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