During repeated visits to his surviving relatives in his native fens, he observed the altered appearance of the scene from the improved method of drainage. It had become like “another world,” and he resolved
——————— “to try
His talent for posterity;”
and “make a book,” under the title of “The Low Fen Journal,” to comprise “a chain of Incidents relating to the State of the Fens, from the earliest Account to the present Time.” As a specimen of the work he published, in the summer of 1812, an octavo pamphlet of twenty-four pages, called a “Sketch of Local History,” by “Will. Will-be-so,” announcing
“If two hundred subscribers will give in their aid,
The whole of this journal is meant to be laid
Under public view.”
This curious pamphlet of odds and ends in prose and rhyme, without order or arrangement, contained a “caution to the buyer.”
“Let any read that will not soil or rend it,
But should they ask to borrow, pray don’t lend it!
Advise them, ‘Go and buy;’ ’twill better suit
My purpose; and with you prevent dispute.
With me a maxim ’tis, he that won’t buy
Does seldom well regard his neighbour’s property;
And did you chew the bit, so much as I do
From lending books, I think ’twould make you shy too.”
In the course of the tract, he presented to “the critics” the following admonitory address.
“Pray, sirs, consider, had you been
Bred where whole winters nothing’s seen
But naked flood for miles and miles,
Except a boat the eye beguiles;
Or coots, in clouds, by buzzards teaz’d,
Your ear with seeming thunder seiz’d
From rais’d decoy,—there ducks on flight,
By tens of thousands darken light;
None to assist in greatest need,
Parents but very badly read,
No conversation strike the mind,
But of the lowest, vulgar kind;
Five miles from either church or school,
No coming there, but cross a pool;
Kept twenty years upon that station,
With only six months’ education;
Traverse the scene, then weigh it well,
Say, could you better write or spell?”
One extract, in prose, is an example of the disposition and powers of his almost untutored mind, viz.
“No animation without generation seems a standing axiom in philosophy: but upon tasting the berry of a plant greatly resembling brooklime, but with a narrower leaf, I found it attended with a loose fulsomeness, very different from any thing I had ever tasted; and on splitting one of them with my nail, out sprang a fluttering maggot, which put me upon minute examination. The result of which was, that every berry, according to its degree of maturity, contained a proportionate maggot, up to the full ripe shell, where a door was plainly discerned, and the insect had taken its flight. I have ever since carefully inspected the herb, and the result is always the same, viz. if you split ten thousand of the berries, you discover nothing but an animated germ. It grows in shallow water, and is frequently accompanied with the water plantain. Its berry is about the size of a red currant, and comes on progressively, after the manner of juniper in the berry: the germ is first discoverable about the middle of July, and continues till the frost subdues it. And my conjectures lead me to say, that one luxurious plant shall be the mother of many scores of flies. I call it the fly berry plant.”