e village rectory, the marshland farmstead, and the cottage home,
and wander far and wide to gain their daily bread. Toil as they might,
farm and field could give them little for their labour, the
mother-country's breast was dry. And yet they loved her--loved her
dearly. Deeply and firmly rooted in his heart is the love of the East
Anglian for East Anglia. The outside world has but recently discovered
the charm of the Broadland: by the dweller there it has been felt since
the day when he first gazed with seeing eyes across its dreamy, silent
solitudes. The secrets of the marshland wastes have been whispered in
his ears by the wind in the willows, and have been sung to him by the
sighing sedge. He knows the bird voices of reed rond and hover, and has
read the lesson of the day's venture in the brightening sunrise and
sunset glow. Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid
in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the
rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend,
her lover. She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should
learn it; she charms him with her many moods. Her laughter is the
sunlight, and ere it has died away she has hidden coyly in a veil of
mist; now she is tearful with the raindrops falling on her changeful
face, but the light comes back with the silvery gleaming of her winding
rivers. When her lover leaves her, and wanders off to wooings far away,
she reproaches him by her silence; and when he has time to think, he
remembers with regret and longing the restful loveliness that was once
about him like a mantle of peace.

Flowering meads, wide-reaching marshland solitudes, lonely heaths and
sandhills sloping downward to the sea; wildfowl-haunted shores and flats,
rivers and lagoons through which the wherries glide, the calling of the
herdman and the sighing of the sea-wind through bracken, gorse, and fir
ridge--these are East Anglia, and, like voices heard in childhood, they
are with her children wherever they may wander, until all earthly voices
are for ever lost in silence.

No one felt the charm of peaceful Eastern England more fully and deeply
than did George Borrow. An East Anglian born, he was nurtured within the
borders of Norfolk during many of the most impressionable years of his
life, and when world-worn and weary, he sought rest from his wanderings,
he came back to East Anglia to die. During his latter days,