Here begins that famous three miles length of bulwark against the sea, Dymchurch Wall. Witches no longer skim across it on their broomsticks, but when the wind comes booming out of the Channel from a lowering sky, and the seagulls fly screaming low upon the water, you will, quite possibly, not believe and tremble, but will understand--what you will by no means comprehend only by reading the printed page--that it is, to the imaginative, a "whisht" place. The modern marshmen are not imaginative, fancy does not breed in their brains, and all they see in a storm is the chance of a rich aftermath of driftwood; but their forebears heard a voice in every wind, and handled every besom with that respect due to a thing which, under cover of night, might have been, and might be again, an unholy sort of Pegasus, bound for some Satanic aerial _levée_. Dymchurch village shelters very humbly behind this Wall, from whose summit one looks down upon it, or, on the other side, down upon a long, vanishing perspective of solitary sands and blackened, rotting timber groynes. The Wall is about twelve feet high, with a curved, concave "apron" of boulders toward the sea, and an abrupt turfy slope on the inland face. The summit affords a fine continuous walk, and has been an undisguised earthen and grassy path since a few years ago, when _£_35,000 worth of paving-stones, provided to make it look neat and town-like, were swept away to sea in a storm. [Illustration: DYMCHURCH WALL.] Bungalows have now begun to appear here and there inside the Wall adjoining Dymchurch, for there are summer visitors to whom the solitude and the unconstrained freedom of the empty sands are welcome; but, situated as they are, close against the inner face of the Wall, they have the blankest sort of outlook. CHAPTER IX HYTHE AND FOLKSTONE