erful even in the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the great numbers of such for whom these counties an

at the standards of perfection in landscape from this point of view arrange th

of British scenery, can never be dispensed with by those reared among them. The sluggish and turgid river consoles them scarcely more than the entire absence of any kind of water. Sometimes it is almost an irritant from the contrast it suggests. Natives of what fo

a high chalk range to the sea. It is only, indeed, as they come within the influence of salt water and begin to feel its tides, that they hav

, AMBERL

onsiderable tributary of that name-rises in Sussex near Robertsbridge, and flowing eastward forms the boundary against Kent for some distance, and in the days of old wound through the heart of Romney Marsh into the sea at Lydd. One of those great storms, however, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which so greatly changed the coast, turned the Rother into the present Sussex channel past Rye and so into the sea. Every one of these rivers makes up in some way for the deficiencies of its earlier and fresh-water period by the manner of its approach to the sea. In the case of the Rother, for instance, though the inland valleys it flows through are in themselves not unpleasing, it is difficult to warm towards a river that has every characteristic of a canal, contracting eventually into a respectable ditch. At Rye, howeve

AR BARCOMBE

are of the best that tranquil southern England has to offer. But the dyked-in waters themselves, flowing sullenly and monoto

s little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within apparent touch of it, seizes one's fancy not a little. For

the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the whole chalk system. Looking down from the top of the prodigiously steep streets of Lewes, or from the summit of the castle, the opposite Down rises like an inaccessible green wall for five or six hundred feet, and one might fancy there was scarcely room for the slow ru

ore insignificant stream up the country, but winds for some way through the chalk range, from Bramber, where it has

NEAR LEW

. Arundel Castle, raised above the town with its wooded park swelling up the face of the Down behind, makes a really noble background to the reaches of the Arun, both above and below. It is an awkward river for boating on account of the pace with which the tide rushes up its reedy, muddy bed, and the distance over which it makes its force felt. But it is perfectly feasible, if forethought be taken, to ascend with the tide for many miles above Arundel, and return with it to great advantage. The swell of the Downs, clad above Arundel with beech-woods approaching at places close to the bank, and th

undel and all the way up past Amberley is a noted haunt of the humbler class of London anglers, whom the railroad, for a quite trifling sum, brings down here by hundreds. At intervals along

the Wey and the Mole, rise in the Weald country

EAR LEITH H

, FITTLEWO

dential region, too, its streams are made the most of in many a pleasant lawn and grove, and by many a country mansion and villa. It runs quite a pace too, here and there over yellow gravel, and sometimes, as between Cobham and Esher, abandons the trammels of civilisation, and slips, in quite wanton fashion, through wild and tangled woodland. But this would brin

many famous fly-fishermen in days when locomotion was less easy than now. But the Medway is the most important of Kentish rivers, both for the length and quiet beauty of its inland reaches and the world-wide fame of its anchorage as it spreads out to meet the Thames. Rising on the borders of Sussex about Penshurst it flows north by three of the most important Kentish towns-Tonbridge, Maidstone, and Rochester-the last, of course, virtually including its stragg

EY, S

frequent groups of the tall chimneys of cement works belching out smoke, and scenery that before the modern industrial period arrived to smirch it, must have been singularly fine. For some half-dozen miles the river continues to roll through an ever-widening but necessarily contracted channel in a quite deep gorge, the Downs rising on either side to a height of five or six hundred feet. The last bridge is at Rochester, still around its Cathedral a quaint old town redolent of Dickens, with the contrasting clangour and pitiless prose of Chatham spreading, unsightly but significant, far over the heights, and looking down on the broad harbour into which the Medway, having a

h near Sandwich its characteristics are entirely and absolutely rural; a quality rather emphasised than otherwise by its picturesque progress through the f

Y, AYLESF

lls that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do credit to Shakespeare's Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its anc

ied a place this famous town still is. Such a considerable slice of West Kent is now involved in the residential districts tributary to London, and the busy shore of the Thames, the county as a whole is apt to take the colouring of these prominent and populous districts in the imagination both of those familiar with them and of others who do not know Kent at all. The whole course of the Stour from its source to its mouth is a

ELSTEAD

pilgrimage in the modern sense prodigious. Its Cathedral, associated with such a trio as St. Augustine, Lanfranc, and Becket, with several unique features and possessions, is probably the most complete illustration of the procession of English ecclesiastical architecture that we have. There are large sections, too, of the city walls still standing at a considerable elevation, and on foundations, at any rate, dating back to Roman times. The finest embattled entrance gate of any surviving in English towns greets the approaching visitor, and quite a good display of ancient houses is still preserved in one that takes a proper pride in itself; though from the vandalism of two or three generations ago even Canterbury has not escaped. Soon after leaving the city, the Stour runs out in its easterly course towards the sea through wide, m

Y, MAIDST

alls within which the beautiful Norman tower of St. Clement's Church rises above the low roofs. Open spaces and gardens lie easily about in the little town which, as an unchanged survival from Tudor or Medi?val times, has no equa

Pegwell Bay opposite Ramsgate it bends suddenly southward, runs for 3 or 4 miles parallel with the east coast to Sandwich, and then doubles back upon the same course to meet the sea at the spot where its original intention of ending its c

s of coins been recovered, while on the rising ground the graves of the early Saxon settlers and invaders lie thick amid the chalk. But the mouth of the Stour, where the action of the sea alone during the long centuries since Roman times affords in itself a fascinating subject, is so rich besides in human memories that I should be in d

WAY, RO