Formerly all the Sussex rivers gave this opportunity for entering from the sea into the centre of the countryside, to which was doubtless due the only too thorough results of the pirate raids in the early part of our history. Thus a Danish ship has been found right up the Rother on the Kentish border near Northiam, at a place where the river is now no more than a brook. Similarly it was easy to sail up the Ouse far beyond Lewes. As we have previously remarked, the Adur was a navigable river till recent times almost as far as Shipley. At present the Arun alone of these waterways remains. It owes its preservation to the fact that the care of man has never been allowed to lapse upon its banks. Its high dykes (still called by the Norman-French name of “rives”) have always been carefully maintained, and where the old river was silting up (as for instance in the great bend by Burpham) new cuts have preserved the scouring of the channel. We must, however, regret that in this direction the canal system by which the Arun was linked up with the rest of England has been deliberately allowed to go to pieces. There used to be a waterway from Ford to Chichester, which made the most delightful of inland excursions, and of which Turner has painted a famous picture. It is now nothing but a dry ditch. Higher up near Hardham another waterway led across the great bend of the river to Stopham and continued, as a canal parallel to the stream, across the Weald until the upper waters of the Wey were reached, and through them the Thames valley. It was therefore quite easy until the destruction of the canal to go by water from the Sussex coast to Weybridge. It is typical of our modern politics that a national advantage of this sort should have been thrown away by Parliament in its subservience to the railway interest, and it is to be hoped that that advantage will soon be regained. The trench is still there and the emplacement of the old locks, and the sum required to put the canal into use again would certainly be recovered in a few years of pleasure traffic alone. The last of the harbours we have to consider is that ramification of creeks on the extreme west of the county known collectively as “Chichester Harbour.” Here also there is a very bad bar and a complicated entrance. From Littlehampton a small boat should make for the point of Selsea Bill and so creep through Looe stream. But she [Illustration: BOSHAM] [Sidenote: CHICHESTER HARBOUR] must take care to do this on an ebb-tide, for it is impossible to get through against the flood.