Northfleet, formerly a small village straggling up the side of a chalk hill, is now to all intents a suburb of Gravesend, so largely has each grown in recent years. Here, officially at any rate, are situated (about a mile to the west of Gravesend proper) those notorious Rosherville Gardens which in the middle of last century made Gravesend famous, and provided Londoners with a plausible reason for a trip down the River. The gardens were laid out in 1830 to 1835 by one Jeremiah Rosher, several disused chalk-pits being used for the purpose; and here the jovial Cockney visitors regaled themselves within quaint little arbours with tea and the famous Gravesend shrimps, and later danced to the light of Chinese lanterns till it was time to return citywards from the day’s high jinks. The Dockyard at Northfleet, constructed towards the end of the eighteenth century, was at one time a place of considerable importance, for here were built and launched numbers of fine vessels, both on behalf of the Royal Navy and of the East India Company. Now it has dwindled to comparative insignificance. Indeed, from a shipping point of view, the only interest lies in the numerous and familiar tan-sailed barges of the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers; for Northfleet is one of the main centres of the cement industry so far as the Thames-side is concerned—an industry which is in evidence right along this stretch till the chalk hills end at Greenhithe, the town from which Sir John Franklin set out in 1845 on his illfated expedition to the North-West Passage. At Grays (or Grays Thurrock, as it is more properly called), on the Essex bank, are numbers of those curious subterranean chalk caves which are a feature of most of the chalk uplands on both sides of the River, and which have caused so much discussion among the archæologists. These consist of vertical shafts, 3 or 4 feet in diameter, dug down through anything from 50 to 100 feet of sand into the chalk below, where they widen out into caves 20 or more feet long. As many as seventy-two of them have been counted within a space of 4 acres in the Hangman’s Wood at Grays. What they were for no one can tell. All sorts of things have been conjectured, from the fabulous gold-mines of Cunobeline to the smugglers’ refuges of comparatively modern times. One thing is certain: they are of tremendous age. Probably they were used by their makers mainly as secret storehouses for grain. They are commonly called Dene-holes or Dane-holes, and are said to have served as hiding-places in that hazardous period when the Danes made life in the valley anything but pleasant. But this, while it may have been true, in no way solves the mystery of their origin.