untrustworthy evidence, to have been in this life a Double-headed Nightingale or a kind of Siamese Twins, that men on pilgrimage became sceptical. But, after all, if saints could perform one kind of a miracle, why not another, and why should not Saint Alphege cause his teeth to be increased, until a peck of them could be gathered from the monasteries of Europe, or Saint Antholin not have his skulls miraculously multiplied if they had a mind to it; and if Saint Frideswyde could be proved to have been possessed of half a dozen arms, was it not for the good, if not of the church, at least of the clergy, that it should be so? And so, it is to be hoped that the Vicar and the Hermit, between them, did well; and also it is to be hoped that the Hermit took more advantage, for washing purposes, of the little stream which here also flowed across the roadway than his brethren were wont to do. The road between Ospringe and Sittingbourne was in those days very lonely, and lonely it still remains, for the settlements of Bapchild, Radfield, and Greenstreet are but dull and dishevelled collections of tiny shops and cottages, with here and there a slumberous old inn or whitewashed farmhouse. The railway to Dover runs on the left hand, within sight of the highway, through the beautiful cherry-orchards and the hop-gardens, and the land slopes gently down to the levels of Teynham and the fertile though ague-stricken marshes of the Swale; that part of Kent where, according to the old local saying, there is "wealth without health"; significantly alluded to in the rhyme-- He that would not live long, Let him live at Murston, Teynham, or Tong. [Sidenote: TONG] Tong Castle, where Rowena "drank hael" to King Vortigern and captivated that very susceptible but unpatriotic monarch; the scene also of the treacherous murder by Hengist and his men of three hundred British nobles, is represented now only by a grassy mound. Here we are in the centre of the hop-growing districts, and the road begins to be bordered with hop-gardens, bare in autumn and winter, except for the great stacks of poles; but beautiful in spring and summer with the climbing bine, planted in long alleys in which women and children work in the long summer days, weeding and tying up the hops, and hanging up the wind-screens called "lews." For the hop-vine is a delicate plant that requires as much cossetting and constant attention as an invalid, and if it is not carefully tended and trained up in the way it should go, it presently droops and dies or becomes too weak to climb up the long twelve- and fifteen-feet poles which it is expected to surmount. And so it is jealously shielded from all draughts and boisterous breezes by long pieces of canvas or string netting, stretched from pole to pole at that side of the gardens whence come the prevailing winds; while every hop-pole is tied so scrupulously and elaborately to its fellow that a June hop-garden is a very maze of string.