[Illustration: THE SISTER ROCKS, ALDERNEY. This island is generally ignored by visitors to the group, but the quaint little town of St. Anne and the fine rocks at the southern end are quite worth seeing.] The history of Sark, for so small an island, is unusually interesting, and in some respects instructive. It is set out by Miss Carey in an interesting chapter, and some of its episodes may be summarized here. Sark, like its sister islands, must have been occupied by neolithic man, for the remains of two poor dolmens still exist in the island, and formerly, no doubt, there were very many more. St. Magloire, in the sixth century, built a chapel and founded a small monastery in the island, but apparently he found it unpopulated when first he arrived. In the middle of the fourteenth century the island was inhabited by a crew of lawless wreckers, who were a menace to the navigation of the whole Manche. The merchants of Rye and Winchelsea then put their heads together, and agreed to do by subtlety what they could not effect by force. Landing on Sark with an armed force must well-nigh have been impossible, till Helier de Carteret cut his tunnel through the rocks, when he colonized the island in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The merchants, accordingly, constructed a piece of strategy that may well have been borrowed from the Trojan horse, but in that case was certainly invested with much ingenious detail of its own. The story is told by Sir Walter Raleigh in his _History of the World_, though, as Miss Carey points out, he postdates the incident by some 200 years, and describes it as having occurred to the crew of a Flemish ship. "Yet by the industry of a gentleman of the _Netherlands_ [the island] was in this sort regained. He anchored in the Road with one Ship, and, pretending the death of his Merchant, he besought the _French_ that they might bury their Merchant in hallowed Ground, and in the Chapel of that Isle.... Whereto (with Condition that they should not come ashore with any Weapon, not so much as with a Knife), the _French_ yielded. Then did the _Flemings_ put a coffin into their Boat, not filled with a Dead Carcass, but with Swords, Targets, and Harquebuzes. The French received them at their Landing, and, searching everyone of them so narrowly as they could not hide a Penknife, gave them leave to draw their Coffin up the Rocks with great difficulty.... The Flemings on the Land, when they had carried their Coffin into the Chapel, shut the Door to them, and, taking their Weapons out of the Coffin, set upon the French."