me.  Only its melancholy remains.  Its harbour, where of old we read the sea-fowl were to be seen in innumerable flocks, and the whole place was musical with the cry of the wild-swan, has been wholly reclaimed, and the famous Hushing Well no longer exists at all.  This last was a curious natural phenomenon and must have been worth seeing.  It consisted apparently of a great pool in the sea, one hundred and thirty feet long by thirty feet broad, boiling and bubbling and booming all day long.  This was caused, it is said, by the air rushing through a bed of shingle beneath which was a vast cavern from which the sea continuously expelled the air as it rushed in.  Nothing of the sort exists at Pagham to-day; it has disappeared with the reclamation of the harbour, which itself was formed, we are told, in the fourteenth century by a tidal wave, when nearly three thousand acres were inundated.  The only thing which the continual fight of man against water in this peninsula has left us that is worth seeing in Pagham to-day is the church of St Thomas of Canterbury.  This is an Early English building much spoiled by restoration, the best thing remaining being the beautiful arcade of the end of the twelfth century.  But the eastern window which consists of three lancets is charming, as is the fourteenth-century chantry at the top of the north aisle, founded in 1383 by John Bowrere.  In the chancel is a curious slab with an inscription in Lombardic characters, perhaps a memorial of a former rector.  The font is Norman.  The church was probably built by one of the early successors of St Thomas in the See of Canterbury; for Pagham belonged to the Archbishops until the Reformation, and certain ruins of their palace remain in a field to the south-east of the church.  At Nyetimber, on the Chichester road, a mile out of Pagham, are the ruins of a thirteenth-century chapel.

To reach Selsey and its old church of Our Lady, what remains of it, from Pagham is not an easy matter, the footpaths across the fields being sometimes a little vague.  The walk, however, is worth the trouble it involves, for you may thus gather some idea of the history of this unfortunate coast, which the sea has been eating up for at least fifteen hundred years.  Indeed, in the time of St Wilfrid the peninsula was probably nearly twice as big as it is to-day, and Selsey was undoubtedly a little island, probably of mud, divided from the mainland at least by the tide.  It was here, St Wilfrid was shipwrecked in 666, and it is from his adventures in Sussex that we learn of the extraordinary barbarism of the South Saxons, two generations after the advent of St Augustine.