But Ireland can scarce have been so ignorant as not to comprehend so very obvious a thing. Either he was not sufficiently frank in his writings, or else assumed a clumsy and not easily-detected archness. For the thing was notorious and patent to everyone. Long before and after his day, Hasted, the historian of Kent, described New Romney as a town of one hundred and eighty houses and one thousand inhabitants, "chiefly such as follow a contraband trade between this kingdom and France." But gone are those times, and the town is now too listless either to grow, or to die and so make an end. The country is in the middle of the town at Romney. The stranger who glances down the quiet street can see the cows grazing round the corner; "baa" comes from flocks and herds, in successful competition with the rare ting-a-ling of alarum-bells on shop-doors, infrequently opened; and the crows and jackdaws hold a noisy witenagemot among the embowering trees of the churchyard--the "God's Acre" of this one remaining church of St. Nicholas, that patron saint who impartially looked after the interests of sailors and thieves. Thieves were, indeed, in the Middle Ages known by the polite title of "St. Nicholas' clerks"--hence perhaps the vulgar term of "nicking" for stealing. [Illustration: NEW ROMNEY.] It is a fine old Norman building, this church of St. Nicholas, with a tower arcaded and panelled in the well-known Norman style, and a grand, black-browed, ponderous interior, infinitely eloquent of old-time importance. The old altar tomb to Richard Stuppeneye, Jurat of the Marsh in 1509, in times before Mayors of Romney, stands at the east end of the south aisle, and was the spot where the business of the town was transacted in days before a town hall was erected; times when men thought it no ill to employ the house of God in between whiles for certain secular purposes. Stuppeneye's tomb, as an inscription states, was erected by his great-grandson in 1622, "for the use of the ancient meeting and election of Maior and Jurats of this port towne." And surely, if there be anything in associations and surroundings the town's business was like to be hallowed by the place where it was conducted, just as the annual election of a mayor beside the worthy Stuppeneye's resting-place should have secured a fitting magistrate. Let no one cite the mayor who sympathised with and aided the "owlers" as an instance of an unfit representative being chosen, for no one outside the Revenue ever thought any form of smuggling sinful. But old customs were broken some nine years since, and no longer is the mayor chosen beside the tomb of that worthy jurat.