and thus improves our temporal condition in this vale of tears; and of that spiritual and intellectual variety which, having founded settlements for the husbandmen, saw to it that his immortal as well as his earthly part should have due sustenance. This is no place to tell how in the course of centuries that Church fell away from its high ideals: here still survive neighbourly farm and parish place of worship, to prove that they once existed.

It is here, in the middle of the marsh, that you perceive how little given to change are the local methods. Sheep are still to be found here in thousands, and still tended, as from time immemorial, by that variety of shepherd known in these parts as a "looker." Ingoldsby names the manservant of Thomas Marsh of Marston, "Ralph Looker," and derived the name, doubtless, from this local title for shepherd.

The terms of a "looker's" employment are curious, and look wretchedly poor, but as they have survived, and show no signs of being revised in these times when labour is scarce on the farms and farmers eagerly compete for help, they cannot be worse than methods of paying shepherds in other parts of the country. A "looker " does everything connected with sheep-tending at an inclusive payment of one shilling and sixpence an acre per annum. For this he looks after the flocks, sees them through the horrors of the lambing season, shears them in summer, succours them in winter, and cures their ailments throughout the year. The sum seems pitiful, but when calculated on farms of six hundred acres or so, works out fairly well.

One comes to love the marsh, to delight in its

byways, and to welcome opportunities for extended exploration. From Newchurch it is easily possible to find a way back to the main road without retracing one's footsteps. That way lies near the spot marked on ordnance maps as "Blackmanstone Chapel," a ruin so thoroughly ruinated that it is difficult to find -and not worth seeing when found. Blackmanstone Chapel was apparently founded by one Blacheman, who held the manor in the time of Edward the Confessor, but, in common with many such chapels, it seems to have been founded more for the repose of a single erring soul than to satisfy any crying spiritual need of the neighbourhood. The adjoining parish of St. Mary the Virgin is more fortunate. It keeps its ancient church in excellent condition. On its pavement the curious may note an epitaph to one Daniel Langdon, "Common Expenditor " of Romney Marsh, 1750.

The cautious explorer of the marsh is careful to carry his nosebag with him, in the shape of some pocketable light refreshment, for the inns are infrequent, and the farm-folk, although hospitable enough, cannot always supply even the most modest demands of the stranger. Milk even-that unfailing product of a farm-is not always to be had, for the morning's supply may already have been sent off to the nearest railway station, and the five o'clock afternoon milking hour be not yet come. Moreover, farmers generally entering into a contract to supply a certain quantity cannot always afford to sell even a single glass. As for farmhouse bread and cheese, dismiss from your mind all thoughts of home-baked bread or local cheese in these times. The bread will often be a tin loaf from the baker's

of Ashford, Hythe, or Littlestone; and the cheesewell, here is the apology of a farmer's wife: "I'm sorry we've no Dutch cheese, but here is some American; we think it very good." Can such things be? you ask. Can they be, indeed? Are they not the commonplace experiences of all those few who really explore the innermost recesses of the country and feel the pulse and count the heart-beats of rural life? Is there not something radically wrong with England when a farmer's wife can make such a speech as that, and not think it strange? In the dying words of the late Lord Winchilsea, a true friend of farming, "God save Agriculture!" when in an English dairying district the farmers buy Dutch and American cheese.

But that is not the only alien article in the farmhouses. Tawdry German glassware and "ornamental" china "decorate" the "best parlour," and the doleful wailings of American organs on Sundays give evidence of the religious instincts of the farmer's family and agonise the unhappy wayfarer. Old England is certainly being cosmopolitanised (good word!) in every direction; here is another instance, for what do we see on the barn-walls and postingstations but the announcement, addressed to the rustics, of a "Fête Champêtre" to be held in aid of a church restoration fund. In the days before Hodge left off saying "beant" and took to using the more cultivated phrase "is not," like the Squire and the Parson, he would-supposing him able to read at all have asked, wonderingly. "What be this 'ere Feet Shampeter ?"-and that would have been a very learned Squire or Parson who could have correctly explained the meaning.

CHAPTER VIII

OLD AND NEW ROMNEY AND DYMCHURCH

RETURNING from this excursion into the intimate things of the marsh, and making for New Romney, attention is arrested by the view of a group of a church and two houses at a little distance from the road. This the map proclaims to be Old Romney, that sometime seaport, busy and prosperous in Saxon times, before ever the Normans came to follow the retreating sea and to found New Romney, a mile and more away. Old Romney is so very old that it has forgotten its past, and antiquaries can tell little or nothing of it; but with our vision illumined by legitimate imagination, we can picture that old port in no uncertain way, perched upon its slight eminence and overlooking the mingling of salt water and fresh at this long-vanished mouth of the Rother; the Saxon ships beached on the shinglefalls, or stuck fast in the alluvial mud of still bayous. Where those keels came to anchor, the ploughman drives his furrow, and where the wooden houses of that old town stood, the broad fields of oats, beans, and turnips ripen in the sun. The population of the whole parish of Old Romney, with its outlying hamlets and cottages, numbers not more than a hundred and fifty, and of village there is but this

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lonely group of church, vicarage, and two farmhouses. The church itself, Norman and Early English though it be, is of the rural type, and thus tells us that already, when it was built, the place had sunk into insignificance. There it stands, on its scarcely perceptible knoll, its broad-based tower, constructed of flint and shingle grouting, eloquent of the Has Been, and still indifferent, as for seven hundred years past, to the To Be. Dynasties, social conditions, the whole polity of a nation, have

changed, time and again, since that old tower first arose beside this Rhee Wall road. All the little injustices, oppressions, and disasters, all the joys and sorrows of seven centuries, all those flouts of cynic Circumstance that in their time seem so great and poignant, have passed it by, and still, with its immemorial attendant yew-tree, it looks upon this ancient road, calmly contemptuous of the wayfarers that come and go. There is that in this merely rural church which impresses one much more deeply than-or in an altogether different way from-the