numbered some four hundred at the beginning, but they gradually became absorbed in intermarriages, until, as a separate race, they ceased to exist. But in that period, while they retained their national manners and architectural style, these "gentile and profitable strangers" did, as we see, succeed in impressing the place with their personality to a remarkable degree. Thus, then, St. Peter's tower dominates the view far and near. St. Mary's tower fell six years later, but was not rebuilt, save in a stumpy and inconspicuous way. St. Clement's tower suffered restoration in 1886; the churchwardens obtained the necessary funds by the expedient of selling the bells! CHAPTER XV SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE Sandwich ends at the Barbican, the foreign-looking watergate that spans the road on the hither side of the Stour. Down to the left, away from the road to Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, can be seen from this point the dark ruin of Richborough, and directly on that road, to the right, a belt of sparse woodland, a clump of thin, wiry trees, insufficiently nourished on the sandy and pebbly soil. In midst of this, solitary and surrounded with an atmosphere of melancholy, is an absolutely uninteresting modern house. These trees and this house form all that remains of the once important and flourishing port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an early rival of Sandwich itself. The spot and an adjoining one are now marked on the maps as "Great and Little Stonar." The history of that vanished town is vague and fragmentary, but enthralling, like some half-told tale of faëry. Its very incertitude renders it into the likeness of a city of dream, the product of a magician's wand, blighted by uncanny spell. What, then, do we know of Stonar? Just this: that in the long ago, in A.D. 456, the Britons under Vortimer, after being deserted by the Roman legions, secured one of their few victories over the invading pagan Saxons on this spot, a spot fixed by the Latin annalist in the phrase, "_In campo juxta Lapidem Tituli_." It was near here, therefore, in these flats, that the battle was fought, and the place seems to derive its name of Stonar from that same Latin "_Lapidem_." Now it is remarkable that the Kentish coast is rich in place-names including the word "stone." Littlestone near Old Romney, is an example--Folkestone another, and the most prominent--the ancient "_Lapis Populi_" of Latin records. But from what stones those original names proceeded who shall say? [Illustration: THE BARBICAN, SANDWICH.]