The lands on either side of the now ineffectual Wantsum are known still as “The Salts.” The days when Sarre was a port are long since done and forgotten, except by industrious delvers into old and musty records. At the same time, it may be not entirely out of place, while lingering here by the parapet of the little bridge, to recall those old circumstances of this “ville of Sarre,” as it is still called. That it is so becomes evident to all who pass through it, from the small notice-board displayed at either end. Going eastward, you read “Town of Sarre,” and coming west, “Ville of Sarre”; and greatly do these inscriptions puzzle those wayfarers who have not read into the history of the place, and therefore do not know that it is still technically a “ville,” that is to say, one of the smaller members of the Cinque Port of Sandwich. Standing here, on the insignificant little bridge that now spans the shrunken Wantsum which in times gone by spread where the grass now grows and the cows graze, it is difficult to realise those mediæval days when Sarre was a favourite port of embarkation for France. It is quite obvious that the name of the Wantsum and the fact of there being nowadays but little water in it must be productive, year by year, of many jocular remarks. I have heard cyclists and others, halting on the bridge, and looking upon the narrow thread of water, say, “Wantsum? yes, wants a good deal I should say. Well, I suppose it’ll _have_ to want.” This is always fondly considered to be new and original; but a census of wayside remarks overheard in the tourist season would doubtless reveal it to be said, in one form or another, many times a day. The people of Sarre probably got tired of hearing it centuries ago, when the early travellers from Canterbury exercised their wits upon it. Only, in those days, you know, before the Wantsum had shrunk, and when it was yet a broad channel, with a ferry-boat plying across, the joke took another form; such as “H’m, Wantsum, call ye it, fellow? Beshrew me, i’ fakins, but it seems, methinks, to want little.” The ferryman must before long have grown quite misanthropical, at hearing the like. Sir F. C. Burnand, sometime editor of _Punch_, and supposed to be a wit, wrote and published in 1897 what he called the “ZZ Guide to the Bold and Beautiful Kentish Coast.” “ZZ” was a new and original way of writing “zigzag”! How did he think of it? He, of course, fell a ready victim to the Wantsum’s name. “The river,” he writes, “was called the ‘Wantsum,’ and the low marshy land was named the ‘Wantsum Moor.’ But ’twas the fate of the Wantsum to be swallowed up by the bigger river Stour. ‘Nobody Wantsum,’ and so the stream disappeared.” Really, now! [Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS-AT-WADE.]