It was a hundred yards or so along the road from Gutteridge Gate that two Dragoons figured in a highway robbery upon His Majesty's Mails in 1789. The bells were chiming three o'clock in the morning of July 31 in that year when Daniel Goldup, the mounted postman, came up the hill from Bridge with the French mails slung across his horse's back. As he eased his pace in ascending the hill, three men called upon him to stop. One of them he recognized as a villager from Elham named Hills, and the two others he perceived to be Dragoons disguised in smock-frocks. Telling Hills he had no letters for him, Goldup proceeded on his way. Hills fired but missed, and the three then ran after him; one laying hold of the horse's bridle while the other two seized the mail-bags and rifled them. They detained him an hour while they examined the letters, and then, tying up the mail-bags again, let him go. The village of Bridge, down below, takes its name from the small bridge that carries the road over the Lesser Stour. It is a pretty and peaceful place to-day, with quaint boarded houses; a Norman and Early English church, containing some curious and grotesque carvings of Adam and Eve; and encircled by woods, the remote descendants of the almost impenetrable forests that once surrounded Canterbury, leaving only Barham Downs and their neighbouring chalk hills bare and islanded amid a sea of greenery. [Illustration: BRIDGE.] Barham Downs commence immediately beyond Bridge. They have been the scene of many remarkable gatherings, from the time of Julius Caesar to the waning years of the last century, when the Downs were alive with soldiers camping here in readiness for that inglorious Armada that never left port--Napoleon's flotilla of Boulogne. To go back to the year 55 B.C., when Caesar first landed at Deal, may seem to the readers of evening newspapers something of an effort in retrogression--and so indeed, it is--but when you once succeed in getting there, the history and details of that time are a great deal more interesting than perhaps the reader of special editions, hot and hot, would imagine. We _can_ succeed in picturing the detailed events of that remote time, because Caesar, who was as mighty with the pen as with the sword, has left full and singularly lucid accounts of his wars here and on the Continent--lucid, that is to say, when one penetrates the veil of Latin behind which his exploits and the doings of his legionaries are hid; but darkly understood by the stumbling schoolboy, to whom the _Bello Gallico_ is as full of linguistic ambushes as the Kentish valleys were of lurking Britons in Caesar's time.