fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following
the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with reeds and
rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and
there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for
fairy-rings. Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and
timber, the lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward
to the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat
on its golden tide. Across the gleaming waters, from where they
lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills,
stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear
sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with
tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines
could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of
the sun's profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a
Paradise. Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the
usual rose-colored spectacles which form an important part of his
stock-in-trade, and they looked abroad on a fairy world. Was not
SHE there: was not HE there: could Romeo or Juliet desire more?

From their feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the
King's highway of the district--a trim, prim line of white above
the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the
low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through
an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of
The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone,
symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very
regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature
everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak
meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the
leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above