almost modern commercial nations: for tin is a
necessary component of bronze, and the bronze age of Europe was
entirely dependent for its supply of that all-important metal upon the
Cornish mines. From a very early date, therefore, we may be sure that
ingots of tin were exported by this route to the continent, and then
transported overland by the Rhone valley to the shores of the
Mediterranean.

The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed the crest of
the Hog's Back and the Guildford downs, crossing the various rivers at
spots whose very names still attest the ancient passages--the Wey at
Shalford, the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the Wantsum
Strait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear the dim echo to this day
of the Roman Vada. Ruim itself, as less liable to attack than an inland
place, formed the depot for the tin trade, and the ingots were no doubt
shipped near the site of Richborough. We may regard it, in fact, as a
sort of prehistoric Hong-Kong or Zanzibar, a trading island, where
merchants might traffic at ease with the shy and suspicious islanders.

Ruim at that time must have consisted almost entirely of open down,
sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum, and extending a little farther
out to sea than at the present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a wide
sea-mouth; Sandwich flats did not yet exist; and the Stour itself fell
into the Wantsum Strait at the place which still bears the historic
name of Stourmouth. Round the outer coast only a few houseless gaps
marked the spots where 'long lines of cliff, breaking, had left a
chasm'--the gaps that afterwards bore the familiar names of Ramsgate,
that is to say Ruim's Gate, or 'the Door of Thanet;' Margate, that is
to say, Mere Gate, the gap of the mere (Kentish for a brook),
Broadstairs, Kingsgate, Newgate, and Westgate. The present condition of
Dumpton Gap (minus the telegraph) will give some idea of what these
Gates looked like in their earliest days; only, instead of seeing the
cultivated down, we must imagine it wildly clad with primaeval
undergrowth of yew and juniper, like the beautiful tangled district
near Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now all
sea-front--it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the
open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and
inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward the
sea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the mid