An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 219 course, I might have vegetated in London in comparative luxury, or scurried all over the Continent till I was "Cooked" to death, for the same money that it cost me to keep a pleasure wherry on the quiet Norfolk Broads, and to waste much on restorations, but I doubt if I should have enjoyed it half as much. Certainly bad I visited the Continent at considerable inconvenience to myself I should never have seen an osprey quartering over Barton Broad, or otters playing like dogs in the dry reeds in the winter at Wroxham, or swallow-tailed butterflies feeding on bramble bloom near Horning Ferry, a spot which> with its great history and its paved ford leading to Canute's St. Benet's at Holme, has always had a great attraction for me beyond the material one of the woodcock and snipe pudding, which I used to have when I often cycled over in the ,,vinter, to be the solitary guest at the "Ferry." Then, since I have been at Lammas I have bad the luck to see a boopoe, a flock of bramblings, and the biggest flood for centuries. Who can say it is dull in the country? If I didn't see the luminous owl myself, I certainly caught the worst cold I ever had while waiting to do so. And I have seen L. gigantium (which I can't grow at home at all) grow like a weed, self-seeding, at Merton and Westwick, and have acclimatized woad and the wild tulip; and have wondered at the chalk hill blue flickering by hundreds at a time on Ringstead Downs. And I have stood, at a low neap tide, on the ruins of Shipden Church a quarter of a mile out to sea and seen :the ridges of the old streets, and have known old Eccles Tower, when it used to stand out of the sands like an old man's last tooth. And how often in my yearly ride or walk round the coast have I enjoyed the tlower cliff hetween Cromer and Runton, mad with th-:: colours of poppies and blue succory before it wa; all barb-wired and stucco-villad, and before the sti-Jf and sickly gardens at Overstrand bad. replaced the Q-a1den of Sleep. WALTER RYE.