A large part of Thorney Island is still only slightly above the level of high-tide. King Street was 5 feet 6 inches only above high-water mark. This was the foundation of Westminster. It was a busy place long before London Bridge was built--a place of throng and moil as far back as the centuries before the coming of the Romans. A church was built in the most crowded part of it; monks in leathern jerkins lived beside the church, which lay in ruins for two hundred years, while the pagan Saxon passed every day beside it across the double ford. During the two hundred years of war and conquest by the Saxons, Westminster, quite forgotten and deserted, lay with its brambles growing over the Roman ruins, and the weather and ivy pulling down the old walls of villa and stationary camp piecemeal. Perhaps--rather probably--there had been a church upon the island in the third or fourth century. Soon after the conversion of the Saxons another church was erected here with a monastic house. Then there was another destruction and another rebuilding, for this place was deserted by the monks; perhaps they were murdered during the Danish troubles. It was King Edgar who restored the Abbey, to which Dunstan brought twelve monks from Glastonbury. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. (MRS. A. MURRAY SMITH.) On the sacred island the last great Prince of the Saxon race, Edward, son of Ethelred the Unready, found Dunstan's little brotherhood of Benedictine monks, who were living in mud huts round a small stone chapel. Out of this insignificant beginning grew a mighty monastery, the West Minster, dowered with royal gifts and ruled over by mitred Abbots, who owned no ecclesiastical authority save that of the Pope, bowed to no secular arm save that of the Sovereign himself. The full title of the Abbey, which is seldom used nowadays, is the Collegiate Church of St. Peter's. King Edward had vowed, during his long exile in Normandy, that if he ever sat on the throne of his fathers he would go on a pilgrimage to St. Peter's shrine at Rome. But after his accession the unsettled state of the kingdom made it impossible to keep this vow, and he was absolved from it by the Pope on the condition that he should found or re-endow a monastic church dedicated to St. Peter. This, therefore, was the origin of the great West Minster, and in afterdays the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor within its walls attracted pilgrims here, and made the building a peculiarly sacred one. Here the Sovereigns of England were always crowned, often married, and until the time of George III. usually buried.