Seabrook melts insensibly into Hythe, that quaint old place whose name, signifying “the harbour,” proves how changed are the local conditions from those remote times when the little town first arose. Then ships came up to it. To-day the sea is distant across a mile-long waste of shingle, and, of all the four parishes in it, but one now remains; with but one church. This, the noble Early English church of St. Leonard, is of much architectural interest; but it is sadly to be supposed that the average holiday-maker is more attracted by the gruesome collection of ancient skulls, exhibited in the crypt, or undercroft. You may see these poor relics, if you have a mind to it, for the fee of threepence, and the curiously morbid taste widely distributed among sightseers brings in a plentiful harvest of pennies and threepenny-bits, all through the summer. The collection at present consists of some six hundred skulls and a neatly arranged stack of bones that once formed the framework of about seven thousand men. They are supposed to be the remains of men of some distant age who fell in battle by the seashore; and, whether they died in the hour of victory or of defeat, we may perhaps assume, now that their bones, so many centuries later, bring a modest income to the church of Hythe, that they did not die in vain. But whether they would have chosen to be a show for the curious and the vulgar is another matter. For myself, I think it a scandal and an indignity, and consider that the clergy of Hythe, past and present, deserve the greatest censure for holding and continuing the exhibition. Were it not that scientific men, examining the skulls, have declared them all to be those of men, we might most fittingly assume that this undercroft was merely a charnel-house, like those seen in Brittany, to which the bones of the older occupants of the churchyard are from time to time removed; but since the remains _are_ only those of men, and as many of the skulls exhibit gashes, the vague ancient legends of some great battle appear to be not without foundation. But at what period that great fight was fought, and between what opposing races, is uncertain. Hasted, in his “History of Kent,” tells us that the battle was fought A.D. 456, between the Britons and the Saxons, and that the Saxons were utterly defeated: “Vortimer still followed the retreating Saxons, and, coming up with them again on the seashore near Folkestone in the year 456, fought a third battle with them between that place and Hythe, gaining a complete victory. Nennius and others say it was fought in a field on the shores of the Gallic Sea, where stood the Lapis Populi.”