go with the Sedan chairs when they were wanted, and so they gradually died out.

Whittlesey Mere existed in those days.  It was thus called because it had nothing whatever to do with Whittlesey.  It was several miles away.  Whittlesey Mere was one of the wonders of Huntingdonshire, Whittlesey being in Cambridgeshire.  Whittlesey Mere was a charming place for skating in frosty weather and for fishing in the summer time, when there was water enough, and for boating under the same circumstances.  Sometimes, when there had been a dry time it became so shallow that you stirred up mud from the bottom when you attempted to sail.  It was very good for fishing.  One day we were out with a party, and we stopped at old Bellamy Bradford’s landing place.  It shelved off so gradually that the distinction between grass and water was so graduated that a large pike, probably in pursuit of a fish, had gone so far as to be prevented from getting back to his native element.  The place was surrounded by reed shoals, where reeds for thatching grew, and these were the resort of innumerable starlings.

PART THE SECOND.

An Oasis in the Desert.—Old System of Castor Farming.—A Lighted Beacon.—The Fen Around Us.—Draining the Great Level.—The Mill System of Draining.—Snatched From the Sea.—How Land Improved in Value.—“Intelligent Fenmen.”—Old Town Bridge.—Old-time Jaunt through the City.—Poor House and New Gaol.—Thorpe Road Hostelry.—Newtown.—The Great Breweries and the Ponds.—Cabbage Row.—Burial at Cross Roads.—Frog Hall.—Gas Works Started.—Old Market.—Ladies and the Cattle.—Wednesday Market.—A Curiosity Market.—God’s Acre.

The great point which strikes us all, and which strikes everyone considering the history of the last seventy years in the City of Peterborough is the very great increase in the population, and when one began to think how it came about we used to say “it is owing to the railways.”  But that is like telling you that the world, as the Indians say, is supported on the back of a tortoise!  You want to know why the railways were wanted, what the tortoise stands upon, because if you look into statistics seventy years ago, before the railways, the population of Peterborough was considerably increasing, and the populations of agricultural districts altogether were very much increasing, and when you go a little further, if you look at all into the history of the land around Peterborough, or the country altogether, you will find within a century there had been a great change.  Now, take for instance the immediate neighbourhood of Peterborough.  My recollection of it begins, as I have said, at the latter end of 1833, at the commencement of the last century.  I think the only parish, if I except Fletton, the only enclosed parish within some few miles of this place was the parish of Paston.

There you will rind the church, surrounded by old trees, and the parish differed very much from others.  If you look into the Churchyard there you will find a great many names of the inhabitants of Peterborough and other parishes outside Paston.  If you look into the Paston register you will find marriages solemnised between inhabitants not belonging to Paston, the undoubted fact being that the enclosed parish of Paston led people to desire they should be married and buried there.  Paston was a kind of oasis in the desert.

Most of the parishes around here were in the position and character of Castor, which until recently was the only open field parish within many miles of this place.  I was riding through Castor field some years ago, before it was enclosed, with a few farmers, when one turned round and said: “How should you like to farm this parish?”  “Not at all,” was the reply.  A man in the parish who had a farm of a hundred acres would have to go to his farm in four different parts of the parish—some against Ailsworth, Milton Park, Alwalton, and so on, perhaps scattered in pieces of one acre, two roods, and so forth.  So that with a large farm a man would have to go to a farm of a hundred acres to as many different places two or three miles apart.  The pieces were so narrow that they were like ribbons; you could plough lengthways but not crossways.  As soon as you turned, you got on to your neighbour’s land, which was frequently a subject of dispute.  Conceive the state of the cultivation of the country generally when that was the system not only in one parish, but in the general bulk, at all events, in this part of the kingdom.

Peterborough was open.  All the parishes, to my knowledge, from Peterborough to Deeping, and east to west, have been enclosed since 1812.  There was a beacon lighted at night to light the passengers over the weary waste, since brought into cultivation.  Just conceive, if you can, the state in which this part of the country was then, and in what it is now, and consider the great increase of corn that can be grown, and not only corn that can be grown, but the stock that can be fed by the cultivation of roots and the introduction of bone manure, and then you get some idea of the increased production of the country, that rendered improved roads, terminating in railroads, necessary.  For the same reason, the marvellous increase in the manufacturing districts has been kept pace with in the agricultural production of the country, another feature in our neighbourhood.

If you begin at Cambridge and draw a line along the high land by St. Ives, east of Peterborough, by Spalding and Boston, down to the Humber, you will find the tract of land known as the Fen Country.  That country has undergone within the last seventy or eighty years, or a great part of it, a change even more striking than that which has passed over the uplands.  At first you would be inclined to doubt whether there were any such places as the Fens at all.  If you say to anybody “Don’t you live in the Fens”? the reply will be “Oh, no.”  At Peterborough we are not in the