Hundreds of thousands of Roman coins have been dug up here, turned up by the plough, or just picked up from the wet earth, after rain. They were for the most part common copper _denarii_, but a great many silver coins, and some gold, have been found, not a few among them of great rarity. I have been fired by the story of these finds to seek for myself. Even a _denarius_ would be something to have retrieved by one’s own personal efforts from this site of an ancient civilisation. But nothing rewarded half a day’s grubbing among the clods. ’Twas ever thus--yesterday, to-morrow, some one else, not to-day--not to ourselves. Oh the hard luck of it! CHAPTER XV SANDWICH Approaching Sandwich, whose towers and roof-tops rise picturesquely ahead from the level marshes, mingled with the masts and spars of a few vessels lying at the town quays, a belt of spindly trees is passed, stretching away to the left. They are trees of a considerable height and size, but they wear an ill-nourished appearance, as they cannot fail to do when we consider how poor the soil on which they grow. It is, in fact, nothing but sand and pebbles. One solitary residence, Stonar House, stands amid these weird woods. The spot keeps an air of reticence and melancholy, appropriate enough, for it is the site of a vanished town: the empty space where once stood and flourished the town and port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an old, and at one time a greater and more prosperous, rival of Sandwich. Rarely ever has a town vanished so utterly as this. We first hear of it in A.D. 456, when the Britons routed the invading Saxons at a spot fixed by the old annalist “in a field close to the Inscribed Stone [_Lapis Tituli_, in the original Latin] on the shores of the Gallic sea.” What was that stone? No one can say. Here again was fought a battle: when Edmund Ironside defeated the Danes, in 1019. [Illustration: FISHERGATE, SANDWICH.] Stonar was situated on an island at the mouths of the Stour and Wantsum. Some archæologists who are not satisfied with the generally received legend of Ebbsfleet believe it was here Augustine landed. The converted King Canute made a grant of it to St. Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury, and in the deeds accompanying the gift we find it named “Estonores.” The name should properly, no doubt, be spelled Stonor: the stone on the edge, or shore. Its _alias_, “Lundenwic,” derived from its position on the then navigable channel of the Wantsum, on the short-cut round to the Thames and London by Reculver; “wic,” like the “wich” of Sandwich, being the Norse _vik_, for bay or channel.