of stout
warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a
certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined channel
now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod, between its
high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.

But to return to my house. It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a
farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing
novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.
There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a strip of
pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust of mortar
and chips of brick, where another old wall stood. There was a great
pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box, and the garden is
still full of old carved stones, lintels, and mullions, and capitals of
pillars, and a grotesque figure of a bearded man, with a tunic confined
round the waist by a cord, which crowns one of my rockeries. But it
is all gone now, and the pert cockneyfied house stands up among the
shrubberies and walnuts, surveying the ruins of what has been.

But I must not abuse my house, because whatever it is outside, it is
absolutely comfortable and convenient within: it is solid, well built,
spacious, sensible, reminding one of the "solid joys and lasting
treasure" that the hymn says "none but Zion's children know." And,
indeed, it is a Zion to be at ease in.

One other great charm it has: from the end of my orchard the ground
falls rapidly in a great pasture. Some six miles away, over the dark
expanse of Grunty Fen, the towers of Ely, exquisitely delicate and
beautiful, crown the ridge; on clear sunny days I can see the sun
shining on the lead roofs, and the great octagon rises with all its
fretted pinnacles. Indeed, so kind is Providence, that the huge brick
mass of the Ely water-tower, like an overgrown Temple of Vesta, blends
itself pleasantly with the cathedral, projecting from the western front
like a great Galilee.

The time to make pious pilgrimage to Ely is when the apple-orchards
are in bloom. Then the grim western tower, with its sombre windows, the
gabled roofs of the canonical houses, rise in picturesque masses over
acres of white blossom. But for me, six miles away, the cathedral is
a never-ending sight of beauty. On moist days it draws nearer, as if
carved out of a fine blue stone; on a grey day it looks more like a
fantastic crag, with pinnacles of rock. Again it will loom a ghos