quently held on our flats which would quite eclipse any of later days. True, they had no organ or harmonium, but the wild roaring of the wind and the fierce rush of the tide made a fitting accompaniment to the loud rude eloquence of our lay preachers, the sobs and groans of the penitent, and the noisy hallelujahs of demonstrative believers.

When summer comes the longshore dwellers live for a time in the blessed sunlight. Marsh hay is mown or cut; the lush grass and other vegetation peculiar to the flats make fodder and litter for the stock in winter. After that follows reed-cutting; the beautiful tasselled reed is valuable for many purposes. The marshman has his gun with him as well as his hook or stake. No matter where he may be, or how occupied, he never lets his gun go far from his hand: "Ye never knows what ye'r goin' to run aginst," he will tell you.

It is a splendid sight, that of these flats covered with a luxuriant vegetation, when the afternoon sun lights all up, and a gentle breeze from off the water-just enough to make the rich grass sway a little-gives the wide expanse the appearance of a glorious inland sea of many colours, belted round in the distance by the woods at the foot of the uplands. One drawback there is to all this beauty: the bailiffs of marshland take heavy dues; ague and intermittent fever are rife. It is a sad sight to see

a powerful man shaking like a leaf, and his teeth chattering in his head on the hottest days of midsummer. If our folks smuggled in those days, who could blame them? Brandy was often of vital importance; spirit in some shape or other all of them had, either in the house or outside it. Laudanum too, in considerable quantities—what most people would consider most dangerous quantities. Now and again a few of the marshmen from the Essex side would come over to settle amongst us—a rare circumstance, and matter of conversation all over the flats. Still more rarely one would come from the fens of Lincoln, Cambridge, or Norfolk, with tales of marshes in comparison with which our own dwindled down into mere splashes.

There was a foreign element in the people; the women showed it more frequently than the men. Their dark hair and eyes, together with warm olive complexions, told their own tale. Finer-looking men and women than some of these you could not find. Tough as pin-wire too; had their constitutions been weak they could ill have stood the deadly cold of winter and the hot moist air of summer.

Autumn seems a short season to longshore dwellers; early winter they may call it more fitly. They take notice of the wild-fowls' flight then. If these shift about and are restless, the marshman judges there will be unsettled weather, and he looks

carefully at his reed-thatched house, if he lives in some nook or corner of the flats. He takes precautions that would seem strange to dwellers in towns, and prepares for the worst.

His long duck-gun in hand he is a human wader, and he moves over the flats with the deliberation of one of his own Jack-her'ns. But like the heron's, his movements are quick enough when his time. comes. See him after a winged curlew on the flats -not on the ooze - and you will wonder at his speed. Any one who has chased a curlew with just its wing crippled, not broken, will know what I mean. Very rarely will the bird escape our

"ma'shman."

Great changes have come to the marshlands of fifty and sixty years ago. How some of these came about we have tried to show in the following chapters.

CHAPTER II.

A CRABBING EXPEDITION.

ELEVEN O'clock had boomed out from the old tower in the ancient market - place of a sleepy old fishing town situated in the midst of wild marshlands, far from all busy scenes of traffic— a place apart, as it seemed, from the rest of the world. The whole town appeared to be asleep on that hot morning in July, not even a dog was moving.

The fine old houses near the quay, which had originally been the homes of wealthy Dutch merchants, but had been long ago turned into warehouses and mills, showed no signs of life. The old trees planted in front of them, no one could tell when, might have been painted ones, so still were they.

On the large quay itself things were not brisker. It was high tide, and excepting the splash of a

bucket or a swab that might be dipped overboard from one or other of the craft that lay at anchor in the calm water, not a sound was to be heard.

I said the whole town seemed asleep; most of the men were really so for the population, with very few exceptions, were all engaged in the same occupation; and the boats having come in on the harbour tide from the fishing-grounds, the men had, to use their own phrase, "bunked it," whilst wives and daughters, well knowing the need their men-folk had of rest, moved quietly about their household duties, the children being still at morning school, except such as were supposed to be old enough to help in the boats.

Just before half-past eleven o'clock the first signs of life were visible in the shape of two fisher-boys coming down the stony pavement of the long main street. The elder of the two, who was about twelve years old, was lightly and airily dressed in an old sou'-wester, a shirt, and a pair of trousers. The shirt had no buttons; on his feet were a pair of old shoes, locally termed "crab shoes," because the toe-parts of the upper leathers had parted company with the soles, so that the shoes opened and shut with each step as he walked along. Under the brim of his sou'-wester, which was much too large for him, curls of brown hair showed on his forehead; and his merry blue eyes were full of life