of progress, must of necessity go with it. The village of Wye, clustering around its ancient church amid the fields through which the river runs, is a most prepossessing spot, and calls for notice as having acquired much deserved reputation of recent years as an active centre of agricultural science. Still but of modest size and running clear though slow, the Stour skirts the foot of Godmersham Park and the high hills that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do credit to Shakespeare's Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its ancient church and less engaging paper-mill, the stream pursues an even course through narrow meadows, washing the lawn of Harton Manor, with its fourteenth-century chapel in the yard, and the grounds of Milton just below, with a similar interesting and curious survival attached to them; while in the woods high above Chartham the "Pilgrims' way" to Canterbury can still be traced with ease between its well-defined banks. The Stour has certainly a high distinction in watering the earliest shrine of English Christianity, and being at its mouth the landing-place of St. Augustine, the creator of it. It traverses in two channels, made picturesque either by carefully tended foliage or fortuitous rows of old houses, the clean and ancient city of Canterbury. The stranger to this corner of England is apt to forget how comparatively remote and countrified a place this famous town still is. Such a considerable slice of West Kent is now involved in the residential districts tributary to London, and the busy shore of the Thames, the county as a whole is apt to take the colouring of these prominent and populous districts in the imagination both of those familiar with them and of others who do not know Kent at all. The whole course of the Stour from its source to its mouth is as continuously and genuinely rural, with as little flavour but that of the soil and its accessories, as any river in Somerset or Shropshire. It is out of reach of all those influences which either disfigure at intervals or give an over-prosperous, artificial, and too decorative touch to so many of the rivers within fifty miles of London. The old families to be sure, as elsewhere in Kent, have practically vanished, but there is [Illustration: THE WEY, ELSTEAD, SURREY] [Illustration]