Since then, Sandgate has largely altered, and instead of being rather an abject attempt at a seaside resort, has been brightened by re-building and cheered by the overflow to it from Folkestone's overbrimming cup of prosperity. Still stands Sandgate Castle on the sea-shore, one of Henry VIII.'s obese, tun-bellied blockhouses, very much in shape like that portly Henry himself, as we may safely declare now that Tudors no longer rule the land; but the very thought would have been treason, and its expression fatal, in that burly monarch's own day. There is a choice of ways into Folkestone--by steeply-rising Sandgate Hill, or by the flat lower road, where a modern toll-gate stands to exact its dues for the convenience. This way the cyclist saves the climb, and pilgrims in general are spared the villa roads of the hill approach to the town, coming to it instead through pleasant woods, with the tangled abandon of the Leas undercliff rising up to the left. Folkestone chiefly interests the Ingoldsby pilgrim because of that eloquent and humorous description of the old town to be found in "The Leech of Folkestone." There was then no new and fashionable town to be described, and the place was "a collection of houses which its maligners call a fishing-town, and its well-wishers a watering-place. A limb of one of the Cinque Ports, it has (or lately had) a corporation of its own, and has been thought considerable enough to give a second title to a noble family. Rome stood on seven hills--Folkestone seems to have been built upon seventy. Its streets, lanes, and alleys--fanciful distinctions without much real difference--are agreeable enough to persons who do not mind running up and down stairs; and the only inconvenience at all felt by such of its inhabitants as are not asthmatic is when some heedless urchin tumbles down a chimney or an impertinent pedestrian peeps into a garret window. "At the eastern extremity of the town, on the sea-beach, and scarcely above high-water mark, stood, in the good old times, a row of houses, then denominated 'Frog Hole.' Modern refinement subsequently euphemised the name into 'East-street'; but 'what's in a name?'--the encroachments of Ocean have long since levelled all in one common ruin." [Illustration: FOLKESTONE.] Nothing of the sort has happened. East Street is still there, and "East Street" yet, but no one has ventured to identify any house with that occupied by that compounder of medicines, "of somewhat doubtful reputation, but comparative opulence," Master Erasmus Buckthorne, "the effluvia of whose drugs from within, mingling agreeably with the 'ancient and fishlike smells' from without, wafted a delicious perfume throughout the neighbourhood."