Excerpt from The Settlers at Home This swamp was long a very dismal place. Fish, and water-birds, and rats inhabited it and here and there stood the but of a fowler; or a peat-stack raised by the people who lived on the hills round, and who obtained their fuel from the peat-lands in the swamp. There were also, sprinkled over the district, a few very small houses - cells belonging to the Abbey Of St. Mary, at York. To these cells some of the monks from St. Mary's had been fond of retiring, in old times, for meditation and prayer, and doing good in the district round; but when the soil became so Swampy as to give them the ague, as Often as they paid a visit to these cells, the monks left off their practice of retirlng hither; and their little dwellings Stood empty, to be gradually overgrown with green moss and lank weeds, which no hand cleared away. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.