streams which meet in the water meadows above Henfield, where it becomes a broad ditch; it cannot be called a true river until it is close upon the hill of Bramber within a few miles of the sea. It is, in fact, a sort of miniature Arun, but its effect in history has been almost as great as that of the larger river, as we shall see farther on, for it also has pierced its own gap through the Downs, and this gap has been, like Arundel, from the earliest times one of the avenues of invasion, and therefore one of the strong places for defence. It runs through this gap, past two delightful and almost unknown relics of mediæval England, parishes that have decayed until they are merely small chapels attached to lonely farms (their names are Coombes and Buttolphs), and comes to where its mouth used to be, at old Shoreham, where was a Roman landing-place, and where the Saxons are said first to have landed also. But the river has built up between itself and the sea a great beach of shingle. Its mouth has gone travelling farther and farther down along the coast, and, had not modern work arrested this process, there probably would have happened to Shoreham what has happened to Orford upon the East Coast. For Orford was also once a great mediæval harbour, the mouth of which has drifted farther and farther off and silted up as it travelled. The Adur will perhaps cut its largest figure in literature from the fact that it has been the occasion of one of the most ridiculous pieces of pedantry which even modern archæology has fallen into. A statement has been made (it has been taken seriously in our universities) that the Adur had no name until about 200 years ago, that the name it now bears was given it by Camden the historian, and that the Sussex peasants took the title of their river humbly from a writer of books, and have continued to use an artificial and foreign word! If anything were required to prove that a contention of this sort was nonsense it would be enough to point out that the word Adur is, like so many of our Sussex names, Celtic in its origin, and means, like so many Celtic names for rivers, “the water”; it is the same as the southern French name Adour. The third river, the Ouse, also bears a Celtic name. It is somewhat larger than the Adur, but considerably smaller than the Arun. Like the Adur it flows from insignificant streams until it gets to its water meadows near Lewes, and also like the Adur it has cut its gap through the Downs, [Illustration: THE TOWN CLOCK, STEYNING] [Sidenote: THE OUSE]