them on the shoulder with an equal absence of fuss or demonstration, and these quiet gentlemen usually say--not without a certain start of surprise, you may be sure--"Oh! I'll come quietly." Then the three (for they are usually two who thus accost one of these undemonstrative and retiring passengers) step again on to the Admiralty Pier, and apparently abandon their Continental trip, for they go up to London by the next train. Sometimes a quiet gentleman refuses to "come quietly" when his shoulder is tapped, and then those who do the tapping are obliged to resort to the painful, not to say humiliating, process of snapping a pair of handcuffs on his wrists, much to the surprise of the passengers. But whether gentlemen elect to go quietly or to take it fighting is not much matter: the result is the same. Sometimes these quiet ones came back to Dover after a while, and were accommodated in free quarters on the Castle Hill; presently revisiting the harbour as masons under Government employ. They come here no longer, for the convict prison on the hill is deserted, and the harbour-works are now carried on with paid labour. And Britain is proceeding with some energy to rule the waves at Dover, for the Harbour of Refuge is completed; to the end that the battle-ships, the merchantmen beating up and down Channel, and the fisher-boats may ride in some degree of safety, protected from the north-easterly gales that nowadays strew the Downs and the Goodwin Sands with wrecks. For centuries this project had been discussed--and shelved in the dusty pigeon-holes of the Admiralty offices. Raleigh reported in the reign of Elizabeth that "no promontory, town, or haven in Europe was so well situated for annoying the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches from the Continent;" and works were commenced to replace the pier begun by Henry the Eighth that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin. But when Defoe was here the Harbour had fallen back into its old state, half-choked with shingle cast up by the set of the tides from the westward, and the piers decayed. "Ill-repaired, dangerous, good for nothing, very chargeable and little worth," those were the epithets the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ applied to it, and thus it remained until 1847, despite local and half-hearted attempts to prevent the accumulation of shingle. In that year the Admiralty Pier was commenced. Meanwhile, the sea, and the tides, thrust out from Dover Harbour by this mighty arm, are setting in strongly upon the Castle Cliffs, and that Castle, the survival of six hundred years of strife and change, is being very slowly but very surely undermined. And thus it goes round our coasts; turn away the currents that eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the havens with sea-drift, and they set with additional fury upon the next unprotected place, presently to be, at great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game