Relations continued strained at Minster, and Culmer did his best to ensure that they should remain so, smashing all the windows of the church, and removing the cross that finished off the spire. With his own hands, by moonlight, he reared the ladders by which the workmen were to ascend for the purpose. His flock assembled, with jibe and jeer, to tell him that he should carry the work to a logical conclusion by demolishing the church itself, seeing that it was built in the form of a cross; but demolition on that heroic scale was beyond him, as the continued existence of the ancient church to this day sufficiently proves. For sixteen long years Richard Culmer remained at Minster, a purge for local pride and a constant source of offence. Then the Restoration relieved the people of his hateful presence, and effected what nothing else could do. Years before he had been offered a yearly pension, equal to the annual value of the living, if he would only go, and let Minster have a parson more acceptable to the place; but he had refused, preferring rather to be an annoyance and a stumbling-block. One of his eccentricities was to demolish part of the parsonage--an act as rabid as that of Goldsmith’s dog, who, “to gain some private ends, went mad and bit the man.” After the Restoration had ejected him, Culmer resided in obscurity at Monkton, and is said to have died two years later. It behoves us now, after having, as in duty bound, visited the ecclesiastical capital of Thanet, to return to the coast. This we will do by way of Acol, near which is found the huge chalk-pit called by Ingoldsby the “Smuggler’s Leap.” This way we skirt Quex Park, and come to Birchington. “Birchington,” says Sir F. C. Burnand, “ought to be a town of schools in association with preparatory academies at Whippingham.” N.B.--This is intended to be funny; but we can, with very little thought, and a glance at the gazetteer, beat the humorist at his own game, and point out that he forgot, as other preparatory academies, Much Birch and Caynham, in Herefordshire, and Waxham in Norfolk. Birchington, the place of the birchen trees, is an ancient village which has not yet become swamped and overwhelmed by seaside villas, although there are a good many to be found if you care to seek them. That, however, would be a sorry quest, even though “Rossetti Bungalow,” the house in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in 1882, in his fifty-fourth year, be among them. Hard by the south porch of the ancient church stands a memorial cross designed by Ford Madox Browne, inscribed: