One refuses further to discuss skulls in the holiday sunshine of Hythe, whose long, narrow street is cheerful and pulsing with life. Hythe street is one of those humanly interesting old thoroughfares which one is inclined, in the mass, to call picturesque; but on reflection it is seen to be really always about to become so, as you advance, and never to actually arrive at any very remarkably picturesque climax. The Georgian town hall, standing on pillars, is interesting, and so, too, is that queer little building called the "Smugglers' Nest," claiming to be a look-out place of some of the many "free-traders" who carried on operations from the town. For the rest, Hythe is old-fashioned and by no means overwhelmed, as many of its neighbours are, by modernity. Here the four separate and distinct streams of seafaring, military, agricultural, and shop-keeping life pool their interests and mingle amicably enough, under the interested observation of a fifth contingent, the summer visitors who find the unconventional attractions of the shingle and the unspoiled place more to their taste than the modish charms of Folkestone. [Illustration: THE "SMUGGLERS' NEST," HYTHE.] Just where Hythe ends and Seabrook begins, the Military Canal comes to a dusty and somewhat stagnant conclusion on the flat foreshore. Lest the dreaded invader should not play the game properly, and meanly attempt to land his troops on the open and undefended beach beyond the tract of country cut off by that "not very practicable ditch," a Martello tower was set up on the little shoulder of a hill overlooking this spot, and there it remains to this day. A grey, grim, giant hotel stands isolated out upon the shingle-banks, and would offer a splendid mark for any modern invader who should descend upon the coast and do the neighbourhood the kindness to blow its hideous presence away. [Illustration: HYTHE, FROM THE ROAD TO SANDGATE.] That stranger who might pass from Hythe to Sandgate and know nothing of the separate existence of Seabrook would have every excuse, for it bears every outward appearance of belonging to one or other. It is largely a recent development, and in so far a pleasing one, for its pretty new gabled seaside red-brick cottages, giving immediately upon the shore, are in the best of taste and have delightful gardens, where the little bare-legged boys and girls of the visitors sit in the sun or sprawl, book-reading, upon the steps. Opposite these, evidences of an enlightened taste, some grey "compo" villas cast a gloom over those who glance upon them and tell us how stupid were those times of some thirty years ago, when such sad-faced houses arose everywhere at the seaside in this grey climate that calls aloud for the cheerfulness of colour in building.