our entrance at King's Ferry, finds no mention in the Ingoldsby Legends, but now that we are here, a thorough exploration might as well be undertaken, and both it and Sheerness visited. Queenborough is a place with a past, and proclaims the fact in every nook and corner of its old streets, where the footfall of the stranger echoes loudly, and tufts of grass grow between the rough cobble-stones of the pavements. Queenborough owes its name to the chivalric courtesy of Edward III., who in 1366 changed it from Kingborough to its present title in honour of his Queen, Philippa. At that time it was an important point, and was fortified for the defence of the Medway by a castle designed by that master-architect and shrewd ecclesiastic, William of Wykeham. Archeologists tell how its ground-plan was in the shape of an heraldic rose, but nearly all traces of it are gone. Its history never included siege or stirring incident, and the buildings were ruinous even in the time of the Commonwealth, when they were sold and carted off in a commonplace and inglorious way. Now-the last note of humiliation-the railway station of Queenborough is built on the site.

The town dates the beginning of its decay from 1377, when Edward III. who had honoured it in the re-naming, eleven years before, ensured its ruin by removing the staple to Sandwich; but some life and enterprise would seem to have been left, even in the time of Queen Anne, for most of the houses in its one long street appear to have been built about the period of that deceased sovereign. Quaint redbrick houses they are, the brick seamed and pitted with age, the roofs high-pitched; the whole with

that indefinite suggestion of a Dutch town which many of these old waterside ports possess, even though it be impossible to pick out one house and find anything particularly Dutch in its design.

It is not without a certain feeling of humiliation that one mentions anything Dutch along the Medway and in the neighbourhood of Sheerness, for Sheerness itself felt the brunt of the Dutch naval attack in June 1667, when seventy-two hostile ships reduced the little sandspit fort, landed a force, and occupied the town. Thence the Dutch Admiral at leisure proceeded up to Chatham, destroying the English ships and even working havoc in the Thames. Pepys at Gravesend remarked in his Diary, "We do plainly at this time hear the guns play," and in terror went off to Brampton, in Huntingdonshire, where he hid his wealth in an unlikely spot. It was not until the end of June that the fear of invasion was past, and no lapse of time has sufficed to wipe away the shame.

The dockyards and forts of Sheerness are to-day very efficient and formidable, but they do not succeed in rendering anything but an unfavourable opinion of the town, whose prevailing notes are meanness and squalor; few others than fishers or seafaring men of the Navy ever set foot here. It is the most considerable place on the island, and, the very Cinderella of dockyard towns, repels rather than invites the visitor.

Bluetown, an outlying residential part, overlooking the sea and possessed of a dwarf seawall and a parade of sorts, is better. Here the Government officials chiefly live, as it were, at the gates of the Unknown, for although there is nothing to hinder

excursions into "the interior," few have ever been those to make the attempt. Looking at Sheppey with the eyes of Sheerness, one in fact regards that town largely in the light of a settlement on the coast of some impossible island in the most impossible of colonies. We shall, however, see that Sheppey contains more of interest in a day's tour than is readily to be found in the same time within the compass of the Home Counties.

For Sheppey it is a redundancy to talk of the "Isle of Sheppey," the ancient Saxon "Sceapige," the "Isle of Sheep," including the designation of "island"-besides containing some of the most notable of Ingoldsby landmarks, has witnessed historic events. The outskirts of Sheerness are, of course, peculiarly soulless and abnormally gritty and dirty. If, however, the explorer perseveres until these are left behind, he will see in the distance, some two-and-a-half miles ahead, an isolated hill rising abruptly from the levels and surmounted by a Church. A nearer approach discovers a pretty countryside and the fact that an interesting village clings round the topmost slopes of the hill. This is the village of Minster-in-Sheppey, thus particularised in order to distinguish it from the betterknown Minster-in-Thanet. The church was once a dependency of the abbey founded here by St. Saxburga, or Sexburga, in A.D. 675; the abbey spoken of in ancient documents as "Monasterium Scapeiæ," or "The Sheppey Monastery." It is this title that has given the village of Minster its name, as found in the changing forms of the word since the twelfth century, when it was "Moynstre." By degrees it became "Menstre," and thence

assumed its present form. It is by no means proposed in these pages to follow the fortunes of Saxburga and her establishment of seventy-seven nuns, nor to tell the story of how the heathen Danes in after years desecrated the place. Sanctuaries existed in those times, it would seem (from the frequency and certainty of their being attacked) expressly for the purpose of being violated, and scarce a religious house, in the course of many centuries, escaped ruin at the hands of pagan piratical hordes, or of internal enemies who, although Christians, were hardly less savage. Even at a time so comparatively late as 1322, some tragical affair, whose details have never been disclosed, took place here, for at that time both the abbey and the church were said to have "suffered pollution from blood," and the Archbishop of Canterbury was entreated to send a faculty for holding a special service of reconciliation, to purge the place.

The abbey, of course, shared the common fate of such establishments, big and little, in the strenuous days of Henry VIII., and its buildings have been so diligently quarried for stone during more than three hundred years that nothing is left of them but the gate-house, which neighbours the west end of the church. Even that has been ingeniously turned to account, and, with the great entrance archway bricked up, and modern sashed windows knocked into the walls, forms very comfortable quarters for the families of two farm-labourers.

But it is not to discuss abbesses, saintly or merely human, that we are here. Diligent readers of the Ingoldsby Legends will at once recognise Minster

in-Sheppey as the principal scene of one of the most interesting and humorous legends of the series, the prose story of "Grey Dolphin ;" and not far distant is the site of Shurland Castle, where Sir Robert de Shurland, Lord of Shurland and Minster and Baron of Sheppey in comitatu Kent, dwelt, and, teste Tom Ingoldsby, "to the frame of a dwarf united the soul of a giant and the valour of a gamecock." There is, true enough, a great, clumsy altar-tomb in Minster church to the memory of that redoubtable Baron, who was a real person, and not one of Barham's "many inventions." And not only a real, but a very gallant and distinguished personage too, of whom it was perhaps rather too bad of Ingoldsby to draw so farcical a portrait. He took . part in the Crusade of 1271, and was at a later period knighted by Prince Edward for gallantry at the siege of Caerlaverock. "If I were a young demoiselle," says an old romance, "I would give myself to that brave knight, Sir Robert de Shurland." Women ever loved brave men.

The effigy of the knight bespeaks a man rather tall and thin, than thick-set and of a dwarfish stature. The local tradition upon which Barham founded the legend of "Grey Dolphin" is that the Lord of Shurland, happening to pass by the churchyard of Minster, found a fat friar in the act of refusing, unless he were paid for his services, to say the last rites of the Church over the body of a drowned sailor brought to this spot for burial. No one felt inclined to pay for the unfortunate mariner's passport to Heaven, and the friar was obdurate, refusing to accede to even the Baron's request. The Baron promptly slew the friar, and kicked his