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The Eden, whose course we have been tracing, having joined the Glen, crosses the Carr Dyke a mile beyond Wilsthorpe, after which the Glen becomes for a time simply a fen drain. The “Bourne Eau” goes into it and they proceed together with many duck decoys marked in the 1828 map on each side of them till they come to the beginning of the great “Forty foot drain.” The Glen then turning east resumes more or less its river character, joins the Welland and goes seawards to the Wash, while the Forty foot going northwards parallel to and with the same purpose as the “Carr Dyke” but a few miles to the east of that famous work, receives the water from the many “Droves” which are all cut east and west and conveys them to the outfall in Boston Haven.

PRIZE-FIGHTING

We will now, without having to go outside the parallelogram of pleasant upland country which lies between the four towns of Stamford, Bourne, Sleaford and Grantham, find the sources of the river Witham and follow them through Grantham as far as Barkston and Marston, and thence through a totally different country to Lincoln. To begin at the beginning of things. Just at the junction of the three counties of Lincoln, Leicester, and Rutland, is a place near ‘Crown point’ called Cribbs Lodge. This commemorates the great boxing match between Molyneux, the black, and Tom Cribb, when, as the Stamford Mercury has it, “after a severe fight Molyneux was beat, and a reel was danced by Gully and Cribb amidst shouts of applause. There were 15,000 people present.” Gully afterwards became an M.P.