Sandgate, into which Seabrook insensibly merges, sits so close upon the shore that it is credibly reported the lodging-house landladies live on the upper floors of their houses in those empty winter months when the winds blow great guns and the seas come pouring into the basements, bringing with them large deposits of that plentiful shingle, fragments of sea-wall, and twisted remnants of promenade railings. Year in and year out, the sea and the Local Board, or Urban District Council, or whatever may be the name of the authority that rules Sandgate, play a never-ending game. In the summer the authority builds up a sea-wall, and, in effect, says to the sea, "You can't smash _that_!" And the sea sparkles and drowses in the sun and laps lazily upon the shore, and artfully agrees. But when the visitors have all gone home, and the equinoctial gales go ravening up and down the Channel, then Londoners open their morning papers and say to their wives, "You remember that sea-wall at Sandgate, my dear, where we used to sit in the shade: it was entirely washed away yesterday by the sea!" But by the time their next holiday comes round there is a newer wall there, on an improved pattern. That, too, is either utterly destroyed in the following winter and flung in fragments into neighbouring gardens, or else, with the roadway and the kerbs and lamp-posts, the pillar-boxes and the whole bag of tricks, swept out to sea and lost. And so the game goes on. It is a costly one, and a heartbreaking for those folks who have semi-basement breakfast-rooms and ever and again experience the necessity of excavating their furniture out of the shingle-filled rooms, like so many Layards digging out the Assyrian relics of Nimroud and Baalbec. When such things can be, the desire of adjoining Folkestone for Sandgate and the determination of Sandgate not to be included within the municipal boundaries of its great neighbour are not readily to be understood. Dramatic things happen at Sandgate. Vessels are cast away upon the road, their bowsprits coming in at the front doors, while shipwrecked mariners, instead of being flung upon an iron-bound coast, are projected against the palisades of the front gardens. At such times the variety of jettisoned cargo that comes ashore is remarkable. One day it will be a consignment of Barcelona nuts; another, a ship-load of boots; what not, indeed, from the jostling commerce that goes up and down that crowded sea-highway, the Channel. When the _Benvenue_ was wrecked inshore here, at the close of 1891, and lay a menace to passing ships, that happened which sent Sandgate sliding and cracking in all directions. The wreck was blown up with dynamite, and soon afterwards the clayey clifflet that forms the foundation for the north side of Sandgate's one street slipped suddenly down, wrecking some houses and cracking many others from roof to foundation. Many, including the London newspapers, thought it was an earthquake.