GEO. ABINGTON, THOS. SCRASE. But a quarter of a century since it was customary to employ the out-door paupers in scavenging, cleansing, and watering the streets, the poor creatures being harnessed, by means of ropes, to the muck-trucks and barrel-constructed water-carts, after the manner that convicts are put to labour in the Government penal establishments and the navy dockyards. The parish officers eventually got shamed out of the system of thus employing those whose only crime was poverty; and for awhile they substituted the health-destroying and heart-breaking plan of wheeling shingle and sand from the beach to the Workhouse-ground in barrows, till one unhappy creature sunk beneath his burthen and died of “disease of the heart!” The custom then was abandoned. The course now pursued towards the indigent is thoroughly to investigate their several cases, and relieve them according to their necessities and deserts: and where laziness and not misfortune is the cause of their penury, to give them an “Able Bodied Ward” ticket of admission to the Workhouse, which not one indolent person in fifty avails himself or herself of, but rather leaves the Board of Guardians, dissatisfied, and eventually resolves upon an attempt at industry, which results in a benefit to themselves and the ratepayers. The system has succeeded beyond all expectations; and many a man who considered the “house” his birthright, because his father and his grandfather from time immemorial wintered there, has taken to provident and industrious habits, and learned the sweet uses of adversity. CHAPTER X. THE ATTACK ON BRIGHTHELMSTON BY THE FRENCH, IN 1545. Henry the Eighth having ravaged Artois and Picardy, by the superiority of his forces, and made himself master of Boulogne, the French king to retaliate the wanton desolations, sent Admiral D’Annehault with a considerable fleet to devastate the country on the southern coast of the island. The invasion is thus described by Holinshead:—