rden or a stained-glass window, is in those sunken and sodden
lands which are always called dreary. Of course the great tulip gardens
did arise in Holland; which is simply one immense marsh. There is
nothing in Europe so truly tropical as marshes. Also, now I come to
think of it, there are few places so agreeably marshy as tropics. At
any rate swamp and fenlands in England are always especially rich in
gay grasses or gorgeous fungoids; and seem sometimes as glorious as
a transformation scene; but also as unsubstantial. In these splendid
scenes it is always very easy to put your foot through the scenery. You
may sink up to your armpits; but you will sink up to your armpits in
flowers. I do not deny that I myself am of a sort that sinks--except
in the matter of spirits. I saw in the west counties recently a swampy
field of great richness and promise. If I had stepped on it I have no
doubt at all that I should have vanished; that aeons hence the
complete fossil of a fat Fleet Street journalist would be found in that
compressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude of
energy, or even of joy. But the last point is the most important of all,
for as I imagined myself sinking up to the neck in what looked like a
solid green field, I suddenly remembered that this very thing must have
happened to certain interesting pirates quite a thousand years ago.

For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I so nearly sunk was
the fenland round the Island of Athelney, which is now an island in the
fields and no longer in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stone
still stands to say that this was that embattled islet in the Parrett
where King Alfred held his last fort against the foreign invaders, in
that war that nearly washed us as far from civilization as the Solomon
Islands. Here he defended the island called Athelney as he afterwards
did his best to defend the island called England. For the hero always
defends an island, a thing beleaguered and surrounded, like the Troy
of Hector. And the highest and largest humanitarian can only rise to
defending the tiny island called the earth.

One approaches the island of Athelney along a low long road like an
interminable white string stretched across the flats, and lined with
those dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At one
point of the journey (I cannot conceive why) one is arrested by a toll
gate at which one has to pay threepence. Perhaps it is a