Samphire-picking is carried on in May, when the leaves of the plant are young and succulent. One must needs be young or active, and of a good nerve, to be a samphire-picker, for it is generally only in the more dangerous and inaccessible situations that it is to be found; and many have in years gone by lost their lives in the “dreadful trade,” not in these latter days so greatly followed, although, to be sure, bottles of samphire pickle are to be purchased at Pegwell Bay. The samphire nowadays more generally appeals to the collecting instincts of those devastating persons, the amateur botanists, and enthusiasts in what is known, in the latest fashion, as “Nature Study,” who are stripping the country of all its ferns and desirable wild plants; and many must be the narrow escapes every year of those who climb cliffs in search of it. The “samphire pickle” sometimes to be bought is not always what it pretends to be, for here, as so often elsewhere, adulteration’s artful aid is called in, and the more plentiful and much more easily gathered glass-wort, which grows on mud-flats, and greatly resembles samphire, without its aromatic qualities, is bottled with vinegar, to the deception of a trustful public. The cliffs along the way to Folkestone are of quite extraordinary interest, so numerous are the schemes and exploitations they display. Here, looking over the edge, you see, on a scrap of foreshore where the railway emerges from the tunnel, a siding with works of sorts and a smoking chimney. This is the site, not only of the Channel Tunnel works, but also of the Shakespeare Cliff Colliery. The idea of a Channel Tunnel, under consideration so long ago as 1867, was originally received with great favour in both France and England, and an agreement upon the subject was arrived at in 1876, by which it was to be begun simultaneously from either side. It was, however, regarded as a commercial project and in no sense as a Government undertaking, the respective Governments merely adopting a benevolent attitude toward the scheme. Some years passed before the Channel Tunnel Companies on either side commenced operations from Dover and Sangatte. It was due to the energy of that arch-contriver, Sir Edward Watkin, that the scheme at last took definite shape and was translated into action. As chairman of what was then the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway (now the Great Central) and of the South-Eastern Railway, he was generally credited with a bold plan for creating a through trunk line from Manchester to London and Dover, and thence beneath the Channel and so on to France, without change of carriage. Like many another Moses, he saw his Promised Land, but could not enter upon it. He brought the old M. S. and L. to London and lived to see it the “Great Central,” but his Channel Tunnel, begun so bravely, was stopped by a nervous Government in 1886, when it had progressed 5,500 feet. A like distance had been tunnelled from the French coast.