In quitting this Appledore I crossed a canal and entered on Romney Marsh. This was grass-land on both sides of me to a great distance. The flocks and herds immense. The sheep are of a breed that takes its name from the marsh. They are called Romney Marsh sheep. Very pretty and large. The wethers, when fat, weigh about twelve stone; or, one hundred pounds. The faces of these sheep are white; and, indeed, the whole sheep is as white as a piece of writing-paper. The wool does not look dirty and oily like that of other sheep. The cattle appear to be all of the _Sussex_ breed. Red, loosed-limbed, and, they say, a great deal better than the Devonshire. How curious is the _natural economy_ of a country! The _forests_ of Sussex; those miserable tracts of heath and fern and bushes and sand, called Ashdown Forest and Saint Leonard's Forest, to which latter Lord Erskine's estate belongs; these wretched tracts and the not much less wretched farms in their neighbourhood, _breed the cattle_, which we see _fatting_ in Romney Marsh! They are calved in the spring; they are weaned in a little bit of grass-land; they are then put into stubbles and about in the fallows for the first summer; they are brought into the yard to winter on rough hay, peas-haulm, or barley-straw; the next two summers they spend in the rough woods or in the forest; the two winters they live on straw; they then pass another summer on the forest or at _work_; and then they come here or go elsewhere to be fatted. With cattle of this kind and with sheep such as I have spoken of before, this Marsh abounds in every part of it; and the sight is most beautiful. At three miles from Appledore I came through Snargate, a village with five houses, and with a church capable of containing two thousand people! The vagabonds tell us, however, that we have a wonderful increase of population! These vagabonds will be hanged by-and-by, or else justice will have fled from the face of the earth. At Brenzett (a mile further on) I with great difficulty got a rasher of bacon for breakfast. The few houses that there are are miserable in the extreme. The church here (only a _mile_ from the last) nearly as large; and nobody to go to it. What! will the _vagabonds_ attempt to make us believe that these churches were _built for nothing_! "_Dark ages_" indeed those must have been, if these churches were erected without there being any more people than there are now. But _who_ built them? Where did the _means_, where did the hands come from? This place presents another proof of the truth of my old observation: _rich land_ and _poor labourers_. From the window of the house, in which I could scarcely get a rasher of bacon, and not an egg, I saw numberless flocks and herds fatting, and the fields loaded with corn!