From the tall, Dutch-like tower of St. Peter's the curfew-bell is nightly tolled, as for seven hundred years the custom has been. The sexton's annual stipend for performing this nightly service is £8; not a great sum for a corporate town to yearly disburse, but something of a consideration for a place like Sandwich, whose commercial greatness is now only a thing of history and ancient repute. Thus it was that in 1833 the unbroken continuity of the curfew from Norman times was seriously threatened, in a proposal of the Corporation to discontinue the practice, and the payment for it. Sentimental considerations, however, prevailed, and thus it is that the nightly bell continues to ring over the melancholy sand-flats, as of yore. But economical considerations again, in quite recent years, threatened the old custom on the same grounds, when, about 1895, it was proposed to discontinue the ringing and to save the money for more practical purposes. Again, however, sentiment prevailed, and what the old inhabitants call "the old charter" continues. This church of St. Peter, one of the three possessed by the town, is its most notable landmark, and from all points of view stamps the town with a distinct alien appearance. It is by no means the principal church--that honour belongs to St. Clement's, whose massive and highly decorated Norman tower is second only to that of New Romney. But St. Clement's tower is only of medium height; that of St. Peter is tall and stark, and is, moreover, capped with an extraordinary turret of distinctly Dutch feeling. Sometimes you laugh at it and think it something bulbous and onion-like; at other times, and from some points of view, it is impressive, rather than absurd. If it were away, Sandwich would lose much of its individuality. It is not an old tower, as ages in churches go, and was built only in the years immediately following 1661, when the older tower fell, and not only involved itself in complete ruin, but demolished the whole length of the south aisle, and, with the bells, buried the whole interior of the church three feet deep in what a contemporary account calls "rubidge." When the inhabitants set to work to repair the damage, they did not restore the destroyed aisle, but just walled up the arches and inserted the quaint Dutch-like windows still remaining. The tower they rebuilt with bricks economically manufactured out of the harbour mud, which, judging from the number of houses built of the same material, seems to have been as plentiful a deposit then as now. The Hollander character of the tower and of the town in general owed its being to the existence at that time of a very large Flemish and Walloon colony, originally formed in Queen Elizabeth's reign, when the persecuted weavers and others from the Low Countries came here as refugees and were welcomed as settlers, not only in Kent, but in many other districts of England. The Sandwich colony