Dismounting here, the astonished stranger finds that the road ends suddenly and without warning, and with it the island as well. It is just a little nerve-shaking. Here one looks down upon a scene of wildest desolation, upon the sea, a hundred feet below, at the bottom of a dark mass of clayey cliffs, slipping and sliding into the water, and torn by repeated landslips into yawning fissures and fantastic pinnacles. The sullen sea is discoloured as far as eye can reach with the dissolving clay, and, horrible to tell, out of many fissures grin bleached skulls, while strewn here and there are human bones. It is a Golgotha. Here stood the church and churchyard of Warden until 1877, and this tumbled landslip is all that remains of them.

For many years this encroachment of the sea at Warden has been in progress, until, up to now, over eighty acres have been washed away. The vanished church has a curious history, having been rebuilt in 1836 with the stones from old London Bridge, demolished four years earlier for the building of the present structure. It was Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, who gave the stones and rebuilt the church of Warden, as duly set forth on a sculptured stone tablet now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row.

By 1870 the sea had crept up to the church, and it was closed, to be pulled down in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the previous thirty years were disinterred and removed to Minster. They are the more ancient dead whose poor remains are exposed with every fall of earth, to bleach in the sun.

From the desolation of Warden it is four miles to

that hooked spit of shells and sand, Shellness, the farthest extremity of the island. By tracks which might, with every excuse, be described as hazardous. the route begins, but soon descends to the low sea-shore and the flat marshes-the shore carefully protected by a long series of dwarf timber groynes and a curved "apron " of concrete, the marshes defended by massive earthen dykes, continued along the circuitous shore all the way round to King's Ferry.

Shellness is well named, for it is a vast expanse of small marine shells, mostly in a perfect condition. Such a beach would be the paradise of holiday children at a seaside resort, but here, at the edge of an obscure island, where there is no life but that of a coastguard station and the nearest village is almost three miles away, it is clearly wasted. Among this wilderness of shells grows the beautiful yellow seapoppy, finding its nutriment in some mysterious manner where no soil can be seen.

Three miles across the sea-channel of the Swale lies Whitstable, plain to see, and in the Swale rides the oyster fleet of that celebrated fishery.

This channel of the Swale was the point of departure selected by James II. when flying, terrorstricken, before the Protestant deliverance of the nation by William of Orange. It was in December 1688 that a hoy was chartered and the fugitive King landed at Elmley, higher up the channel, intending to put off from this point or hook of Shellness; but the unwonted spectacle of a humble boat containing persons in the garb of great gentlemen landing in that obscure place in those troubled times created a sensation among the fishermen, who took them for

Jesuits, and, hating Popery and eager for plunder, mobbed them. They thought the King was that notorious Jesuit, Father Petre. "I know him by his lean jaws," said one. "Search the hatchet-faced old Jesuit!" exclaimed another. They snatched his money and watch; his coronation ring and valuable trinkets-even the diamond buckles of his shoes-they took for glass and did not touch.

Then-tremendous discovery!-someone recognised him as the King. A momentary awe seized them, but they quickly recovered, and this poor trembling James they took, incoherently protesting, in custody across the Swale and into Faversham, there to be placed under surveillance.

This is why this corner of Sheppey is interesting. It witnessed one of the final scenes in the tragedy of the Stuarts.

CHAPTER XVIII

SOME OUTLYING INGOLDS BY LANDMARKS

NETLEY ABBEY

THREE miles from Southampton, in the county of Hampshire-or, as official documents still have it, the county of Southampton-is Netley Abbey, one of the scattered Ingoldsby landmarks outside Kent. It is not evident from the context in the Legends when or on what occasion the author visited Netley, nor does it appear to be explained in the "Life" by his son. The ruined abbey stands almost on the shores of Southampton Water, divided from that beautiful land and seascape only by a road and the gardens of a narrow fringe of villas. The site is naturally lovely, but has been spoiled and vulgarised by the neighbourhood of the great military hospital and the draggle-tailed, unkempt, and sordid line of mean shops and public-houses which that institution has conjured up. So surely as Government buildings-be they hospitals, offices, barracks, or prisons are erected on any spot, that spot is certain to be spoiled, and this is assuredly no exception. Stucco-fronted public-houses of the "Prince Albert" and "Hero of the Alma" type and period jostle the struggling, compendious greengrocer's shop that deals at one and the same time