* * * * *

These dykes of the Fens are accursed things:  they are the separation of friends and lovers.  Here is a man whose crony would come and sit by his fireside at evening and drink with him, a custom perhaps of twenty years’ standing, when there comes another man from another part armed with public power, and digs between them a trench too wide to leap and too soft to ford.  The Fens are full of such tragedies.

One may march up and down the banks all day without finding a boat, and as for bridges there are none, except, indeed, the bridges which the railway makes; for the railways have grown to be as powerful as the landlords or the brewers, and can go across this country where they choose.  And here the Fens are typical, for it may be said that these three monopolies—­the landlords, the railways, and the brewers—­govern England.

* * * * *

But at last, at a place called Oxlode, I found a boat, and the news that just beyond lay another dyke.  I asked where that could be crossed, but the ferryman of Oxlode did not know.  He pointed two houses out, however, standing close together out of the plain, and said they were called “Purles’ Bridge,” and that I would do well to try there.  But when I reached them I found that the water was between me and them and, what is more, that there was no bridge there and never had been one since the beginning of time.  Of these jests the Fens are full.

In half an hour a man came out of one of the houses and ferried me across in silence.  I asked him also if he had heard of the Griffin.  He laughed and shook his head as the first one had done, but he showed me a little way off the village of Monea, saying that the people of that place knew every house for a day’s walk around.  So I trudged to Monea, which is a village on one of the old dry islands of the marsh; but no one at Monea knew.  There was, none the less, one old man who told me he had heard the name, and his advice to me was to go to the cross roads and past them towards March, and then to ask again.  So I went outwards to the cross roads, and from the cross roads outward again it seemed without end, a similar land repeating itself for ever.  There was the same silence, the same completely even soil, the same deep little trenches, the same rare distant and regular rows of trees.

* * * * *

Since it was useless to continue thus for you—­one yard was as good as twenty miles—­and since you could know nothing more of these silences, even if I were to give you every inch of the road, I will pass at once to the moment in which I saw a baker’s cart catching me up at great speed.  The man inside had an expression of irritable poverty.  I did not promise him money, but gave it him.  Then he took me aboard and rattled on, with me by his side.

I had by this time a suspicion that the Griffin was a claustral thing and a mystery not to be blurted out.  I knew that all the secrets of Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn words, and that the simplest of things will not be told one if one asks too precipitately; so I began to lay siege to his mind by the method of dialogue.  The words were these:—­