Returning from this excursion into the intimate things of the marsh, and making for New Romney, attention is arrested by the view of a group of a church and two houses at a little distance from the road. This the map proclaims to be Old Romney, that sometime seaport, busy and prosperous in Saxon times, before ever the Normans came to follow the retreating sea and to found New Romney, a mile and more away. Old Romney is so very old that it has forgotten its past, and antiquaries can tell little or nothing of it; but with our vision illumined by legitimate imagination, we can picture that old port in no uncertain way, perched upon its slight eminence and overlooking the mingling of salt water and fresh at this long-vanished mouth of the Rother; the Saxon ships beached on the shingle-falls, or stuck fast in the alluvial mud of still bayous. Where those keels came to anchor, the ploughman drives his furrow, and where the wooden houses of that old town stood, the broad fields of oats, beans, and turnips ripen in the sun. The population of the whole parish of Old Romney, with its outlying hamlets and cottages, numbers not more than a hundred and fifty, and of village there is but this lonely group of church, vicarage, and two farmhouses. The church itself, Norman and Early English though it be, is of the rural type, and thus tells us that already, when it was built, the place had sunk into insignificance. There it stands, on its scarcely perceptible knoll, its broad-based tower, constructed of flint and shingle grouting, eloquent of the Has Been, and still indifferent, as for seven hundred years past, to the To Be. Dynasties, social conditions, the whole polity of a nation, have changed, time and again, since that old tower first arose beside this Rhee Wall road. All the little injustices, oppressions, and disasters, all the joys and sorrows of seven centuries, all those flouts of cynic Circumstance that in their time seem so great and poignant, have passed it by, and still, with its immemorial attendant yew-tree, it looks upon this ancient road, calmly contemptuous of the wayfarers that come and go. There is that in this merely rural church which impresses one much more deeply than--or in an altogether different way from--the sight of a cathedral. The great minster means intellectual and religious exaltation; here a sense of the futility of men and things--of the evanescent nature of those who build and of the astounding permanency and indifference of the things they rear--clutches the heart with the grip of ice. Not here the _sursum corda_ of the pilgrim, but the gloom of the pessimist and the tears of those who sorrow for the littleness of our little span are called forth by the solitude, the isolation and minatory prominence of this marshland church. For though it be neighboured by farmsteads, the brooding spirit of the place is communicated to them, rather than their domestic cheerfulness irradiating its aloofness.