"These two kept a fishing-boat, but the fish they caught was many and many a barrel of Nantz brandy, which we landed--never mind where--at a place to us well known. In the innocence of my heart, I--a child--got leave to go out fishing. We used to go out at night and meet ships from the French coast. "I learned to scuttle a marlinspike, reef a lee-scupper, keelhaul a bowsprit as well as the best of them. How well I remember the jabbering of the Frenchmen the first night as they handed the kegs over to us! One night we were fired into by his Majesty's revenue cutter _Lynx_. I asked what those balls were fizzing in the water, etc. "I wouldn't go on with the smuggling; being converted by Mr. Wesley, who came to preach to us at Rye--but that is neither here nor there...." [Illustration: _The Ypres Tower, Rye._] [Sidenote: JOHN WESLEY] It was under the large tree of the west wall of the churchyard that in 1790 John Wesley preached his last outdoor sermon, afterwards walking through "that poor skeleton of ancient Winchelsea," as he called it. Rye, like Winchelsea, has had a richer history than I can cope with. She was an important seaport from the earliest times; and among other of our enemies who knew her value were the Danes, two hundred and fifty of whose vessels entered the harbour in the year 893. Later the French continually menaced her, hardly less than her sister Cinque Port, but Rye bore so little malice that during the persecutions in France in the sixteenth century she received hundreds of Huguenot refugees, whose descendants still live in the town. Many monarchs have come hither, among them Queen Elizabeth, in 1573, dubbing Rye "Rye Royal" and Winchelsea "Little London." [Sidenote: THE THREE JEAKES]