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itants," and such natives as did not feel themselves in honor bound to keep their mouths shut agreed on one point; that the system of Yorkshire schools was monstrous and iniquitous to an incredible extent; that frightful cruelties were practised upon the boys who were chiefly the illegitimate offspring of London parents but that the school typified by Charles Dickens was the only one to which he could gain access, and was the best of the lot. There were two other schools at Bowes, one at Gilmonby, one at Cotherstone, and one at Barnard Castle; and the proprietors of these, suspecting the presence of a famous literary Londoner amongst them, refused him admittance; but at Shaw's he was made welcome and shown over the premises.

But in other respects the evidence was so conflicting that we must simply give it without pronouncing any opinion on its value or the reverse. For instance, one woman, a native of Bowes, whose sympathy one would naturally imagine to be with the maligned Squeers, told us that she distinctly remembered the boys coming in summer-time to her father's fields to help get in the hay, goaded to the work of horses by ushers armed with whips. On the other hand, a gentleman whose father, being a schoolmaster, used to go up to the Saracen's Head with and on the same errand as Squeers, declared that the one-eyed schoolmaster was an estimable man, who cared for his pupils properly, and was generally respected and liked. He further stated that his father related to him how he happened to be at the Saracen's Head with Squeers after the Dotheboys Hall numbers of "Nicholas Nickleby" had taken the public by storm; that the crowd literally besieged the inn, with the intention of lynching Squeers; that the commotion had such an effect upon the schoolmaster as to deprive him of reason, and that Mrs. Squeers died of a broken heart.

Another gentleman - once in holy orders - told us that he was at Bowes Grammar School contemporaneously with the existence of Shaw's school, that Shaw was known as the " King of the Road," because every half-year he hired a special coach to bring his pupils from London, and that the arrival of this coach at Bowes was the occasion of universal excitement and enthusiasm. He furthermore cited, as a proof that Shaw was maligned as to his treatment of his pupils, that great rivalry always existed between the Grammar School boys and those of Dotheboys

Hall; that they played tremendous football matches together; and that every Easter Sunday it was a custom to appear in new suits and to pelt each other with Easter eggs. A fourth informant told us that the deaths at Shaw's school were frequent, that a large proportion of the boys were maimed by ill-usage, and that the neighboring cottagers were continually giving shelter to runaways. A fifth spoke of the prototype of Fanny Squeers as a woman universally beloved and respected, who did infinite good among the poor and sick of the parish.

All however spoke of Shaw as a man subject to fits of violent passion, and admitted that he was addicted to using the cane unmercifully when under these influences.

In other instances, when we ventured to propound questions to more illiterate folk, we found that without committing themselves to giving any definite opinion, they tried to evade the questions, and thereby tacitly admitted that there was a great deal more truth in what Dickens had written than their local patriotism allowed them to express.

The graves of "Squeers," his wife, of "Fanny Squeers," and of young "Wackford," who died at the age of twenty-four, are to be seen in Bowes churchyard. The late assistant station-master at Barnard Castle, Mackay by name, was said to be a son of the original of Nicholas Nickleby. John Browdie was one John Todd of Barningham, and died not very long ago; and the original of poor Smike is said to have died during the year 1885, aged seventy-four.

When we add that the "original" bowl and ladle with which Mrs. Squeers used to dispense brimstone and treacle to the boys were sold a short time back for ten pounds, and that many of Squeers's old pupils have done very well in life, and frequently come to revisit the old house at Bowes, we exhaust the information we were able to collect concerning Mr. Squeers and Dotheboys Hall.

There is much else that makes a visit to Bowes an interesting excursion. The little Norman church, put into excellent order and well cared for by the present clergyman, Mr. Wardale, contains some curious old Saxon relics; and indeed there is a strong Saxon local color all about this neighborhood, as we may see in such names as Thorsgill, Wodenscroft, Bal dersdale, and Romaldskirk Under the west window of the church, outside the wall, is a tablet erected to the memory of

Roger Wrightson and Martha_Railton, | pedestrian may on a winter's day walk for better known as the Edwin and Emma of miles along the old road without hearing Mallet's beautiful and pathetic ballad. any sound but the "cluck, cluck" of the Mr. Wardale told us that on Sundays it is partridges and the detonation of the quite amusing to note the number of rus- breechloader, and without seeing a human tic sweethearting couples who throng to being but a stray beater stirring the birds this spot to vow love as true and lasting as to flight by waving a flag. was that of Edwin and Emma.

A curious stone in a cottage garden at tracts the visitor's notice and becomes interesting when he is told that where it now stands was once Bowes market-place, and that during a long-bygone period of pestilence the people from untainted districts brought their dairy produce and placed it on this stone, retiring to some distance whilst purchasers from infected places took the goods away, placing the payment in a basin of water.

Of old Bowes Castle only the keep remains; but, mere shell as it is, the masonry is superb, being in places eleven feet thick, and in the days of catapults and archery must have made Bowes an awkward nut to crack.

Behind the castle and church are the intrenchments which mark the site of the important Roman station of Lavatræ, connected with Cataractorum or Catterick Bridge on the one side by the camp behind the Morritt Arms Inn at Greta Bridge, and with Verteræ or Brough on the other by the earthworks at Spital. Here are the remains of the ubiquitous Roman bath, this one built by Valerius Fronto in A.D. 202; of an aqueduct connected with the Tees, which foams far below; and if funds were forthcoming doubtless other most interesting "finds" would be brought to light, although the site has been ransacked at a remote period.

There are probably few more utterly silent and desolate highways in Britain than this sturdy old Roman road upon which Bowes stands; but a six-mile tramp along it in a westerly direction is interesting. The road runs as it was laid down two thousand years ago, on a high-raised bank built up of the stone which abounds in this country; and on either side stretches a wild, picturesque moorland district, famous for its game, and with which are associated innumerable weird legends and traditions. At five miles distance is a large solitary old house standing amidst the only trees in the district, known as Old Spital, once a changing-house for the coaches, and famous as being the scene of a dark tragedy related under the title of "The Hand of Glory."

Beyond this house the scenery if possi ble grows more wild and desolate, and the

Beyond a lonely turnpike, long disused, the road rises until it gains the summit of Stanemoor. Here, amidst intrenchments of some grandeur, stands in a trough a stone, known as the Rey Roy or Rere Cross, once the boundary between the kingdoms of England and Scotland, now marking the border of Yorkshire and Westmoreland - and alluded to by Scott in "Rokeby,”.

And the best of our nobles his bonnet shall Who at Rere Cross on Stanmore meets Allan vail, a Dale.

It is also interesting as being the traditional spot where Malcolm Canmore and William the Conqueror met to decide by battle the boundary line of their respective kingdoms, but settled the dispute amicably, one of the articles of agreement being that "in the midst of Stainmoor there should be set up a cross with the King of England's image on the one side, and the King of Scotland's on the other, to signify that one is to march to England and the other to Scotland."

Beyond this we are not tempted to go, as a bitter wind is rising, and dark night is falling; so we make the best of our way back to Bowes, well primed for a reperusal of "Nicholas Nickleby" over the fire in the cosy parlor of the Golden Lion, Barnard Castle. H. F. A.

From All The Year Round. THE CINQUE PORTS. ENGLAND has changed, physically, since the Norman Conquest. Dunwich is almost gone; half-a-dozen east-Yorkshire villages, named and entered in Henry the Eighth's "Liber Regis," are quite gone. There has been compensation, too, such as it is, both in the Lancashire sands, and in the mud at the Wash. But the greatest changes, physical and social, have been in the south-east of Kent. In Roman days, and for some time after, Thanet was cut off by a wide estuary, Portus Rutupinus, by the Saxons called Wantsum, with Rutupiæ (Richborough) at its south entrance, Regulbium (Reculver), or Rutupiæ

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Winchelsea- the name interpreted, in a queer mixture of British and Saxon, as Gwent-chesil-ey (level shingle isle) minds us of the Chesil Bank, which joins Portland Isle to the Dorset coast, and which is made of pebbles gradually lessening in size as it runs farther out, so that a practised smuggler could, in the darkest night, tell exactly where he had beached his boat by pesing (weighing in his hand) a few of the stones.

Alteræ, at its northern entrance. Despite | Rhee wall; all the district belonging to gradual shrinking, it was for centuries the Canterbury (given by Offa), and the inregular waterway from France to London. nings being the work of successive archShips thus escaped the chance of head bishops. Guildeford Marsh, however, winds round the Foreland. When Rich- remained water; and Oxney, between the borough got high and dry, and its water branches of the Rother, was still an became a marsh, Sandwich was founded island; indeed, in the great inundation further out on the accumulating sands. of 1287, which helped to form the ZuyBut the Stour, driven north by the der Zee, Winchelsea, with its eighteen "eastward drift," now trickles through a churches, was destroyed, and for a time dreary waste, which was once the famous Rye got deep water. Sandwich Bay, and joins the sea under Thanet cliffs, close by the little Bay of Pegwell. Romney lost its harbor chiefly from a different cause; the "inning" of the marshes. Before Roman times, Romney Marsh, still in many parts ten feet below medium high-water mark, was a shallow sea, bounded on the north by the low cliff line from Shorncliff to Hythe and Lymne, on the east by the growing shingle deposit of the eastward drift, unchecked by Dungeness, which had not yet begun to grow out seaward. Who reclaimed the whole triangle of twenty-two thousand acres by building what is called the Rhee wall, from the southwestern corner of the shingle bank right up to Appledore, no one knows. It may have been the Belgæ, who were very fairly civilized; if it was the Romans they did it early, for the soil is full of Roman remains of every date. Clearly, it was all done at once; there is no trace of intermediate works. The shingle bank was strengthened into what is now Dymchurch wall; and the Rhee bank, with a channel which turned aside most of the water of the Lymne, completed the work.

For a time the "inning" of Romney Marsh improved Romney Harbor and the whole Rother estuary; but two causes led to its being silted up, and to Rye and Winchelsea being ruined as seaports, while Romney was compelled to shift seaward and become New Romney. Of these one was the lessening outflow of the rivers, due, they say, to the cutting down of the great Andrede's wood (the Weald); the other, the growth of Dungeness (calculated at from seven to twenty feet per year), which blocked Romney Harbor against the tides and so stopped the "scouring," which had kept it from being choked up. As late as the fourteenth century, Rye was on a hill in a fair tidal harbor, and Winchelsea was only too accessible from the sea, as is proved by its frequent captures by the French. Before this, Denge Marsh on Dungeness, near Lydd had been "inned," and so had Walland and other marshes south of the

All these shingle deposits are due to the same cause the uniform action of wind and tide sweeping along vast masses of sand and shingle; the speed growing as the channel narrows. For three-quarters of the year the prevailing winds are southwest, and they are helped by the flood-tide, which, thanks to the Atlantic tidal wave, is stronger than the ebb. Stones and sand, therefore, are driven eastward, the latter going farthest, the smaller stones being, as a rule, carried further than the big ones. The shingle beaches are thrown up directly by this twofold action; the sandbanks Goodwin Sands, the shoal that fills Sandwich Harbor, the Dogger Bank, and the Dutch and Belgian sands formed where the meeting of tides or currents causes dead-water.

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This eastward drift has ruined "our English Hansa," as the Cinque Ports have been called, almost as completely as like causes have killed "the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee,” and a number of towns along the coast of Provence. Not one has escaped.

Hastings thrives, but not as a port; the first Hastings is under the sea; you can trace it at low water by the rocks which mark the old shore line. When the sea broke in the shingle followed, the little rivers were choked, and a pebble beach formed, which is the foundation of the parades and terraces. One can measure the extent of these unrecorded changes by noting that an island, a mile and a half long, which in Norden's map, two centuries ago, fronts St. Leonard's, is gone, though no record has been kept of its disappearance.

Dover holds its own, thanks to unlimited | could; it washed away the old town, and expenditure; "its own "being nothing but in Henry the Second's reign Hastings was a winding creek. It has more Roman re- let off with eighteen ships, Rye and Winmains than any of its sister ports; the chelsea being ordered to make up its basement of one pharos still stands on quota with an extra ship apiece. A hunthe cliff; so did a fragment of the other - dred years later it was rated at six, and the Bredenstone till it was swept away then sank to five, at which it stood through the other day for some new fortifications. the rest of the Cinque Ports history. Its name is British. Dwr is the little river. Did you never, when walking in Wales, get a drink of dwr glan (clear water) at a cottage, and mark, if you were classical, that dwr and the Greek name for water are sister words?

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In Domesday, Godwin's favorite town is said to owe the king twenty ships, each with twenty men, for fifteen days a year. The passage fee for a king's messenger to France was threepence for a horse in winter, twopence in summer, the burgesses finding a pilot and assistant; if more help was wanted it must be paid for.

Foreigners had by no means such good terms. Erasmus (1497) complains bitterly of extortion, and says some Antwerp men, who once took him across, were almost as bad as the English. "As an ape is always an ape, so a sailor is always a sailor," is his verdict; "they steal your baggage, ay, filch your purse when they get the chance." In his day the fare was still the same; "half a drachma," he calls it.

A falling off this, from the palmy days of the Third Crusade, when, in 1147, Hastings took the lead of the Cinque Ports ships, and of Robert Earl of Gloucester's "sea calves" from Southampton, and when a Hastings priest was chosen Bishop of Lisbon as soon as the expedition had wrested that city from the Moors!

There is nothing ancient in Hastings, except the few mouldering castle walls nothing like the remains at Dover; or the Wiper's tower at Rye, built by Stephen's captain of mercenaries, William of Yprès; or the grand Romanesque churches at Hythe and Romney.

Of all these towns, Sandwich is the quaintest. Its church is fine, with the finest towers in Kent; it has some fine flamboyant windows, and a curious clock, with huge pendulum reaching down to the floor. And many of its houses have such an old-fashioned Dutch look. Many, alas! have lately been pulled down. When I was last there a broker's shop was full of blue and white tiles, the fruit of one of these wholesale demolitions.

For a long time Stonor, now a small village, rivalled Sandwich; and both were London's main ports, Stonor being in the tenth century called Londonwick. Both suffered from the Danes, and both were granted to Canterbury Stonor by Cnut, to St. Augustine's; Sandwich by Ethelred, to Christ Church.

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Hastings not Roman at all (for Pevensey is the Roman Anderida, with fine remains still of its old castle) has more of a history than Dover. Hastings the pirate Richborough is perhaps the finest Rois a myth; the name is from the Haes- man castle in England; and certainly its tingas, a south-Saxon clan, conquered position, amid marshes and slow streams with the rest of the south-Saxon land by where the sail of a lighter comes upon you Offa of Mercia. He gave the gens Haes- quite unexpectedly, is not devoid of poetry. tingorum to the Abbey of Saint Denis; But the silt killed Richborough; and and, by-and-by, Æthelstan set up a royal though the Walloons (Dutch) gave new mint, and collectors can show a whole life to Sandwich, Richborough's successor, series of Hastings coins. After the Con the improvement was only temporary. quest, Hastings rose to be premier port The colony strove hard, by its baize manamong the five. Its "barons" took prece-ufacture, to bring back prosperity to the dence at coronations; its name came first in writs and charters; William built its castle, and gave it to the Count of Eu, on the opposite coast. A necessity of his existence was to keep open communication with the Continent. Hence, a port that just fronted his own Normandy suited him better than Dover. But William could no more stop the sea than Canute

decaying place. In 1565 the houses, which had sunk to two hundred, had more than doubled, a third being built by refugees. Seven years later Elizabeth visited the town, chiefly to arrange about these Dutch settlers. Poor creatures! they had come for liberty, and found strict rule. "They shall have their children baptized according to the order now used here under pain

The strength of the Dutch element in Sandwich is curiously shown in 1605. Sir W. Monson, who had been driving away some Dutch ships, writes: "Thousands, beholding me from the shore, cursed both me and his Majesty's ships. And no marvel; for most of the inhabitants are either born, bred, or descended from Holland."

of banishment," says the edict. And their and Romney, Hythe, and Sandwich, only morals were looked after with equal sever- five apiece. ity. In 1584, "eight notorious drunken Flemings" were banished. As the queen went through, scaffolds were set up in the streets, hung with black and white baize, and children placed thereon spinning yarn. But baize-making would not scour out the harbor. Richard the Third, who did more good than he gets credit for, had tried and │| failed. Henry the Eighth promised, and did not perform. Most tantalizing of all Their mark is still seen in the excellent must have been Protector Somerset's gardening-early broccoli in such cold, characteristic reply, in the name of poor low-lying land, for instance. Whether or little Edward: "The Sandwich burgesses not they have anything to do with the have our full liberty to use for their harbor seed-growing, which is one of the great all the proceeds of selling the church fur- industries of Romney Marsh, I know not. niture in their three parishes." One thinks The seed-harvest is one of the things to of the man in Molière's comedy who, when be seen if you are there in the season. So the knavish valet tells him his son is held also are Dymchurch wall, which is always to ransom by Turks, says: "You know en évidence, and Hubert de Burgh's Maithe big trunk up in the cock-loft? Go and son Dieu, at Dover. This Maison Dieu, take all the old clothes out of it; sell them restored not long ago, was founded by to the marine-store men, and ransom with Shakespeare's "gentle Hubert," as a place the money. where poor soldiers returning from foreign service might have a fortnight's free quarters.

In Elizabeth's time the silting up got worse, and a deal of extra anti-Popery feeling was roused, thanks to a big Spanish galleon belonging to Pope Paul the Fourth, which ran aground, and could not be got off. Perhaps it was owing to the shallowness of their harbors that the Cinque Ports ships, like the Channel steamers nowadays, were always small. When Richard the First wanted big ships for the voyage to the Holy Land, he got nearly all his fleet from the coast of Anjou, | from Southampton, and from the western ports. From the Bayeux tapestry, and from twelfth and thirteenth century seals, we see that the Cinque Ports ships were only half-decked boats of from twenty to fifty tons. A fishing-boat, in fact, was turned into a gent de guerre (man-of-war) | by rigging up a fore and aft "castle;" a square open box, that is, to shelter the crossbow-men. There were no rudders, the steering being managed with two oars worked over the quarter. And, there being neither chart nor compass, we need not wonder that wholesale wrecks were the rule in these shoaly seas. With the fourteenth century the bigger merchant ships began to be used for war. These had a second mast, a long stem answering for bowsprit, and a rudder; but the Cinque Ports kept to the smaller craft, of which, during John's fever of nautical enterprise, "Premier Port" (Hastings) furnished six, the "two ancient towns," Winchelsea ten, Rye five; while of the "eastern ports "Dover supplied twenty-one,

Dover Harbor, by the way, dates from Henry the Eighth. The old harbor was blocked up by the fall of a huge mass of cliffs. Henry built a pier with two round towers at the ends; yet Dover decayed rapidiy; and the spirit which burst out when the Armada came was but an expiring flash.

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New Romney had fallen so low that, when Leland walked" there in Henry the Eighth's time, he reported: "It hath been a netely good haven, insomuch that within men's remembrance ships have come hard up to the town, and cast anchors in one of the churchyards. The sea is now two miles from the town, so sore thereby decayed, that where there were three great parishes and churches, is now scarce one well maintained." Add to this the perpetual expense of keeping open sluices and repairing sea walls, and it is no wonder that in the last century the population sank to five hundred. Thanks to the marsh cattle-fair, it has now again risen to one thousand two hundred. Romney was a great place for the old mystery plays; the Lydd records contain lists of the cost of dresses, scenery, the scribe's labor, and other curious particulars.

Hythe has come out best from the loss of its harbor, because the loss was total. For over two hundred years it has been given up as hopeless; grass has grown on silt and shingle, and the beach has been used for more than thirty years for the

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