248 THE ISLE OF RUIM. 



season, seeking tranquillity in a game of cards, repairing 

 their health with the stimulus of donkey exercise, or 

 soothing their souls in secret hour with music sweet as 

 love, discoursed to them by gentlemen in loose pink 

 suits and artificially imitated Ethiopian countenances. 



Westgate is the very latest-born of these Thanet gates, 

 a brand-new watering-place, where every house proclaims 

 the futility of the popular belief that Queen Anne is 

 dead, and where fashionable physicians send fashionable 

 patients to cure imaginary diseases by a dose of fresh air. 

 It has no history, for only a few years since it consisted 

 entirely of a coastguard station and three or four 

 cottages : but it is interesting as casting light on the 

 nature of the revolution which has turned Thanet inside 

 out and hind part before, making the open sea take the 

 place of the Kentish mainland, and the railway to 

 London that of the silted Wantsum. 



At the present day Thanet as a whole consists of two 

 parts : the live sea front, which is one long succession of 

 suburban wateyiug-places ; and the agricultural interior, 

 including the reclaimed estuary, which ranks among the 

 best-farmed and most productive districts in all England. 

 Yet till a very recent date the Thanet farmers still 

 retained the use of the old Kentish plough, the coulter 

 of which is reversed at the end of every furrow ; and 

 many other curious insular customs mark off the agricul- 

 ture of the island even now from that which prevails over 

 the rest of the country. 



I don't know whether I'm wrong, but it often seems to 

 me the very best way to gain an idea of the real history 

 of England is thus to take a single district |)iecemeal, 



