The dockyards and forts of Sheerness are to-day very efficient and formidable, but they do not succeed in rendering anything but an unfavourable opinion of the town, whose prevailing notes are meanness and squalor; few others than fishers or seafaring men of the Navy ever set foot here. It is the most considerable place on the island, and, the very Cinderella of dockyard towns, repels rather than invites the visitor. Bluetown, an outlying residential part, overlooking the sea and possessed of a dwarf sea-wall and a parade of sorts, is better. Here the Government officials chiefly live, as it were, at the gates of the Unknown, for although there is nothing to hinder excursions into "the interior," few have ever been those to make the attempt. Looking at Sheppey with the eyes of Sheerness, one in fact regards that town largely in the light of a settlement on the coast of some impossible island in the most impossible of colonies. We shall, however, see that Sheppey contains more of interest in a day's tour than is readily to be found in the same time within the compass of the Home Counties. For Sheppey--it is a redundancy to talk of the "Isle of Sheppey," the ancient Saxon "Sceapige," the "Isle of Sheep," including the designation of "island"--besides containing some of the most notable of Ingoldsby landmarks, has witnessed historic events. The outskirts of Sheerness are, of course, peculiarly soulless and abnormally gritty and dirty. If, however, the explorer perseveres until these are left behind, he will see in the distance, some two-and-a-half miles ahead, an isolated hill rising abruptly from the levels and surmounted by a Church. A nearer approach discovers a pretty countryside and the fact that an interesting village clings round the topmost slopes of the hill. This is the village of Minster-in-Sheppey, thus particularised in order to distinguish it from the better-known Minster-in-Thanet. The church was once a dependency of the abbey founded here by St. Saxburga, or Sexburga, in A.D. 675; the abbey spoken of in ancient documents as "Monasterium Scapeiæ," or "The Sheppey Monastery." It is this title that has given the village of Minster its name, as found in the changing forms of the word since the twelfth century, when it was "Moynstre." By degrees it became "Menstre," and thence assumed its present form. It is by no means proposed in these pages to follow the fortunes of Saxburga and her establishment of seventy-seven nuns, nor to tell the story of how the heathen Danes in after years desecrated the place. Sanctuaries existed in those times, it would seem (from the frequency and certainty of their being attacked) expressly for the purpose of being violated, and scarce a religious house, in the course of many centuries, escaped ruin at the hands of pagan piratical hordes, or of internal enemies who, although Christians, were hardly less savage. Even at a time so comparatively late as 1322, some tragical