Tappington has again passed away from the Barhams. Ingoldsby's son, the Reverend Richard Harris Dalton Barham, Vicar of Lolworth, Cambridgeshire, resigned that living in 1876, and retired to Dawlish, South Devon, where he died in 1886; but considerably earlier than that date he had agreed, having no children, to sell the property and divide the proceeds with his two sisters. This was accordingly done. Although the scenery is so sweetly beautiful, the soil is said to be very poor--mostly unfertile red earth, mixed with great quantities of flints, the rest chalk. A great extent of the property is still coppice and scrubwood. An advertisement of 1890, offering the place to be let, is interesting: FARM.--KENT.--Tappington Everard, Denton, near Canterbury, comprising Homestead, with Picturesque Residence (formerly occupied by the Rev. R. H. Barham, author of the _Ingoldsby Legends_) and about 245 Acres of Land, of which 144 Acres are Pasture, and 101 Acres Arable. Rent £220. Early possession may be had.--For terms and further particulars apply to Messrs. Worsfold & Hayward, Land Agents, Dover, and 80, Cannon Street, London, E.C. CHAPTER VI ROMNEY MARSH The scene now changes to Romney Marsh. It was in 1817, in his twenty-ninth year, that Barham came to this recondite region, the Archbishop of Canterbury having collated him to the rectory of Snargate, with which went at that time, by some mysterious ecclesiastical jugglery that does not concern us, the curacy of the parish of Warehorne. He lived by preference there, rather than in the malarious marsh itself, at Snargate, and thus the vicarage house that stands, amid a recent melancholy plantation of larches, to the left of the road on entering the village, has its interest, for we may suppose that in it he lived, although, to be sure, it has undergone alterations, and its stuccoed abominations and feeble attempts at Gothic design must be later than his day. It is a disappointing house to the literary pilgrim who loves his Barham--gaunt and dismal-looking as you pass it; but the site is interesting, for we must by no means forget that it was here, driven to it by the weariness of being confined to the house after breaking his leg in a gig accident, in 1819, that he turned to literary composition. A novel called _Baldwin_ was the result. It was published anonymously, and was not--nor, as a perusal of it satisfies one, did it deserve to be--a success. He was only serving his apprenticeship to letters, and had not yet discovered himself. That he speedily improved upon this first effort becomes evident in his succeeding work, begun immediately after the completion of the first. This, partly written here, was the novel of _My Cousin Nicholas_, a work of splendid and rollicking humour now undeservedly forgotten. Before he had finished the manuscript a change came over his professional prospects, for in 1821 he was induced to apply for a minor canonry of St.