And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone.
There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giant
Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who, when the
Marshland men (possibly the Romanized inhabitants of the wall
villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle for
a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their
despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seen
a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which
there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the
spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the
dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal
thread which is trickling over the dyke--or worse, through some
forgotten rat's hole in its side--hundreds of men are clustered,
without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers,
fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sake
alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their own
year's bread.
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