six hundred years old, you seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years!"

The patron saint of Ely is Etheldreda, the queen of King Egfrid, a lady so pious that she determined to live a virgin. Fortunately the king agreed to this eccentric choice of his spouse, and she founded an abbey, and became its abbess. Her whole history resembled that of a majority of the early saints. Her title is often bestowed as " queen, wife, virgin, and

saint."

Ely has been very fortunate in having a literary man for its dean for many years, so that the cathedral handbook prepared by Dean Stubbs, now Bishop of Truro, is as interesting as a book of essays.

The Isle of Ely has had Christian worship since the seventh century. Episodes of much significance have transpired within its territory, and one of the most dramatic of these is that of King Knut rowing by, and hearing the monks chanting. The old ballad commemorating this event has been translated as follows:

"Merrily sang the monks of Ely,
Knut the king rowed by,

'Listen how the winds be bringing
From yon church a holy singing,

Row, men, nearer by.'

Life in the early days in the Fen Country has been described in a clear way in two works of fiction, Kingsley's "Hereward the Wake," and MacFarlane's "Camp of Refuge." Both of these should be read at Ely. Froude, in "Thomas Carlyle's Life in London," speaks thus of Ely: "His first halt was at Ely. He arrived in the evening, and walked into the cathedral, which, though fresh from Bruges and Ghent, he called one of the most impressive buildings he had ever seen in his life.' It was empty apparently. No living thing was to be seen in the whole vast building but a solitary sparrow, when suddenly some invisible hand touched the organ, and the rolling sounds, soft, sweet and solemn, went pealing through the solitary aisles. He was greatly affected. He had come to look at the spot where Oliver had called down out of his reading desk a refractory high church clergyman, and he had encountered a scene which seemed a rebuke to his fierceness."

Fuller tells us that the willow tree" delighteth in moist places and is triumphant in the Isle of Ely." Baskets have always been a conspicuous product of this town; even Martial alludes to "a basket rude from painted Britons come." So even in the woad period it is evi

dent that the willows were understood and adapted to local needs.

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In the Camp of Refuge " MacFarlane describes Saxon Ely: "The abbey built at Ely in the tenth century . . . was a stately stone edifice, vast in its dimensions and richly ornamented in details. Round-headed arches rested upon rows of massive columns; the roof of the church and the roof of the great hall of the abbey were arched and towering, and high above all the tower and steeple shot into the air, to serve as a landmark throughout the flat fen country, and a guide to such as might lose themselves among the meres and the labyrinths of the willow forests. If the monks of Ely were lords of all the country and of all the people dwelling in it, those people and all honest wayfarers ever found the hospitable gates of the abbey open to receive them, and all comers were feasted according to their several degrees by the Lord Abbot, the prior, the cellarer, the hospitaller, the pietancer, or some other officer of the house. Twenty knights, with their twenty squires to carry arms and shield, did service to the Lord Abbot as his military retainers, and in his great stables room was left for many more horses . . . compared with some of the fen monastic houses, Ely was dry,