* Prose Idylls, New and Old, by Rev. Charles Kingsley.
One of the most characteristic walks in the Fen country is that from Peakirk (St. Pega Kirk), a station on the Peterborough and Spalding line, to Crowland. The road runs along the top of a high bank, raised so as to be above the reach of the inundations. On either hand a flat and dreary plain stretches to the horizon. It is intersected by ditches filled with black stagnant water and fringed by aquatic plants, amongst which the yellow iris is prominent. Here and there a farm-house, approached by an avenue of pollard-willows, and surrounded by a few acres of well-cultivated land, breaks in upon the monotony of the scene. Elsewhere the vegetation is rank and coarse but abundant, upon which droves of horses and cattle thrive. A perpetual chorus of croaking from innumerable frogs in the marshes accompanies the pedestrian on his way, to which the sweet notes of the sedge-warbler and other small birds form an exquisite accompaniment.
In the winter, when the fens are flooded and frozen over, the scene is one of rare interest and excitement. The clear sharp ring of the skates on the ice, the merry shouts of the skaters, the stir and bustle of a district usually so dull and stagnant, the feats of agility and skill displayed by a peasantry to skate a mile in two minutes, but without success, though he is said to have only exceeded the two minutes by two seconds.
The ordinary pace of a fast skater is one mile in three and a half or four minutes." He who is so fortunate as to see one of the great skating-revels of these eastern counties under the glowing light of a sunrise or a sunset will not easily forget it--for the sunrises and sunsets of the Fen country are of incomparable splendour. It is an error to suppose that the dry pure atmosphere of Southern Europe is favourable to these magnificent effects of colour. Some of the finest sunsets I have ever seen have been when walking westward along Oxford Street on a frosty evening. The clouds of smoke and mist hanging over the great city have become suffused with a glory of crimson and purple and amber with which no Italian sky can compare. So in the Fen country, the clouds and fogs driven inland from the sea, and the humid vapours exhaled from the soil, glow with all imaginable hues in the light of the setting sun. The cold colourless landscape reflects the radiance and is tinged with the colours of the sky; the skaters as they glide swiftly past through the golden haze seem like actors in some fairy spectacle.