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In the winter, when the fens are flooded and frozen over, the scene is one of rare interest and excitement. The clear sharp ring of the skates on the ice, the merry shouts of the skaters, the stir and bustle of a district usually so dull and stagnant, the feats of agility and skill displayed by a peasantry to skate a mile in two minutes, but without success, though he is said to have only exceeded the two minutes by two seconds.
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The ordinary pace of a fast skater is one mile in three and a half or four minutes." He who is so fortunate as to see one of the great skating-revels of these eastern counties under the glowing light of a sunrise or a sunset will not easily forget it—for the sunrises and sunsets of the Fen country are of incomparable splendour. It is an error to suppose that the dry pure atmosphere of Southern Europe is favourable to these magnificent effects of colour. Some of the finest sunsets I have ever seen have been when walking westward along Oxford Street on a frosty evening. The clouds of smoke and mist hanging over the great city have become suffused with a glory of crimson and purple and amber with which no Italian sky can compare. So in the Fen country, the clouds and fogs driven inland from the sea, and the humid vapours exhaled from the soil, glow with all imaginable hues in the light of the setting sun. The cold colourless landscape reflects the radiance and is tinged with the colours of the sky; the skaters as they glide swiftly past through the golden haze seem like actors in some fairy spectacle.