Immediately at the end of the next hamlet, Court-at-Street, a steep, rough lane deeply sunk between rugged banks and overhung with trees leads down to the Marsh, or rather, to a little plateau or undercliff looking upon it. It is a beautiful view you get hence, a variant of other beautiful glimpses on the way from Lympne to Appledore, taking in the flat Marsh and the Royal Military Canal and the long sweep of coast curving to Dungeness. But something other than a mere view-point makes the spot interesting. It is a little building, roofless and otherwise in ruins, that stands there; a building with one remaining architectural feature in the shape of a late doorway, probably of the time of Henry the Seventh. This was anciently a chapel. The reason of its being placed in a situation so obscure is lost, but there must have been an excellent one for such a choice, for mediæval chapels commonly stood, as shops do now, in positions that commanded traffic, and for the same reason: that they should secure the notice and the custom of wayfarers, by whose alms and offerings they were largely supported. At the time when the story presently to be told was enacted this chapel had already fallen upon evil times. Whatever relics it had possessed had--as modern theatrical managers say of their unsuccessful plays--“failed to attract”--and the hermit who once had lived there was gone. [Illustration: ROMNEY MARSH: THE MARTELLO TOWERS AND MILITARY CANAL: MOONLIGHT.] But it has a late story of its own, a tragical story of the tragic and epoch-making age of Henry the Eighth. In those last few years when it was still roofed and weather-proof it was used by the cunning priests of a declining and damnable creed for the purpose of keeping alive their almost exploded superstitions. Reformation was in the air, in things spiritual and temporal alike, and the religious houses were presently to be dissolved and to be made loose their hold upon the large proportion of English soil they had accumulated by centuries of bequests. Some sign, any sign, was required by the doomed clergy of that age by which the pretensions of their class could be bolstered up and the actions of a King bent upon reform discredited; and such a sign, the religious of Canterbury acutely believed, could be made to appear from the strange possession, demoniacal or angelic--that had suddenly befallen a peasant girl in Aldington, one Elizabeth Barton, at that time a servant in the employ of Master Thomas Cobb, bailiff to the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Cobb lived in the little house still standing at Aldington, and now known as “Cobb’s Hall,” and was startled when his maid-servant suddenly developed strange and terrifying behaviour, and began to rave on religious matters. To modern ideas the symptoms detailed in the lengthy old accounts of Elizabeth Barton’s career would seem to point to epileptic fits, followed by religious mania; but the simple folk of those times thought her inspired, and