that respect due to a thing which, under cover of night, might have been, and might be again, an unholy sort of Pegasus, bound for some Satanic aerial levée.

Dymchurch village shelters very humbly behind this Wall, from whose summit one looks down upon it, or, on the other side, down upon a long, vanishing perspective of solitary sands and blackened, rotting timber groynes. The Wall is about twelve

of

feet high, with a curved, concave apron " boulders toward the sea, and an abrupt turfy slope on the inland face. The summit affords a fine continuous walk, and has been an undisguised earthen and grassy path since a few years ago, when £35,000 worth of paving-stones, provided to make it look neat and town-like, were swept away to sea in a storm.

Bungalows have now begun to appear here and there inside the Wall adjoining Dymchurch, for

there are summer visitors to whom the solitude and the unconstrained freedom of the empty sands are welcome; but, situated as they are, close against the inner face of the Wall, they have the blankest sort of outlook.

CHAPTER IX

HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE

FROM Dymchurch, five miles of excellent road bring one into Hythe, that old Cinque Port whose early Saxon name means "harbour," and thus tells those among us who are thinking men how important a place it was of old. "The Harbour," definitely and emphatically it was, of capital importance in those far-away times when Sandwich, Romney, Dover, Folkestone, and others were of less moment; but even by the time the Cinque Ports came into existence it had declined to inferior rank among its brethren, and when Dover was required to furnish twenty-one ships for the defence of the nation, and Winchelsea and Hastings respectively ten and six, Hythe, Sandwich, Rye, and Romney were assessed at only five each. Where is that harbour of which some vestiges remained to the time of Elizabeth? that haven which, according to Leland, was strayt for passage owt of Boloyn ? Where but choked up, embedded, and deeply overlaid beneath a mile-long waste of shingle! The glory of that storied port is buried "full fathom five.' Everywhere is shingle. A world of it expands before the vision as one comes out of the marsh towards the town, and Martello towers and forlorn congeries of more modern forts stand

islanded in midst of it. From the sunlit glare of this waste the road enters Hythe, through an exquisitely beautiful woodland, open and unfenced from the highway, with the landward ridge of hills and the Military Canal approaching on the left.

"Hythe hath bene," says Leland, "a very greate towne yn length, ande conteyned IIII paroches, that now be clene destroied." The greatest surviving evidence of that ancient estate is the one remaining church of St. Leonard, which tops the hill behind the High Street and is the crown and distinguishing mark of Hythe from afar off. It is chiefly of Early English architecture, and an exquisite example of its period, with a noble chancel like the choir of a cathedral, and a remarkable crypt or undercroft, stacked with a neatly-disposed heap of many hundreds of skulls and large quantities of human bones. No one knows in any definite manner how, why, or when these gruesome relics were brought here, but legendary lore tells how they are the remains of those who were slain in some uncertain fight-so uncertain that whether between Britons and Romans, Romano-British and Saxons, or Saxons and Danes is not stated. Borrow, in his Lavengro, plumps for Danes, more perhaps because he had a prejudice for that hypothesis than from any evidence he could have produced, if asked. That many of the owners of those skulls did actually meet a violent death is quite evident in the terrific gashes they exhibit. One may see these poor relics for threepence, and Hythe does a roaring trade with the morbid in photographs of the shocking collection; but it were better

they were decently buried and given rest from the handling and the flippant comments of the shallowminded crowd.

One refuses further to discuss skulls in the holiday sunshine of Hythe, whose long, narrow street is cheerful and pulsing with life. Hythe street is one of those humanly interesting old thoroughfares which one is inclined, in the mass, to call picturesque; but on reflection it is seen to be really always about to become so, as you advance, and never to actually arrive at any very remarkably picturesque climax. The Georgian town hall, standing on pillars, is interesting, and so, too, is that queer little building called the "Smugglers' Nest," claiming to be a look-out place of some of the many "freetraders" who carried on operations from the town. For the rest, Hythe is oldfashioned and by no means overwhelmed, as many of its neighbours are, by modernity. Here the four separate and distinct streams of seafaring, military, agricultural, and shop-keeping life pool their interests and mingle amicably enough, under the interested observation of a fifth contingent, the summer visitors who find the unconventional attractions of the shingle and the unspoiled place more to their taste than the modish charms of Folkestone.

Lest

Just where Hythe ends and Seabrook begins, the Military Canal comes to a dusty and somewhat stagnant conclusion on the flat foreshore. the dreaded invader should not play the game properly, and meanly attempt to land his troops on the open and undefended beach beyond the tract of country cut off by that "not very practicable