Hitherto, in dealing with the two larger of the Channel Islands, we have found their claims to natural beauty in their coasts. The interior of Jersey is no doubt pleasant, with its lush-green valleys running north and south, with its quiet little villages, and with its never-ending potato-fields. The interior of Guernsey, on the other hand, is frankly hideous, save here and there a cottage, or a picturesque old farm, hidden in the folding of some safely secluded dell. But in both cases alike the real distinction of the island is limited to cliffs that for warmth of colour and strangeness of contortion can surely be paralleled in Cornwall alone. Sark, on the contrary, is almost wholly coast; the interior in comparison is a negligible quantity! And almost as much may be said of Alderney. Both these islands are exceedingly small—Sark being only a trifle more than three miles in length, and about one and three-quarters of a mile in breadth (measuring, not precisely from east to west, but at right angles to the axis); and Alderney being about three and a half miles in length, from north-east to south-west, and one and a quarter miles in breadth. Alderney is undoubtedly the less beautiful of the two, and is probably by far the least frequently visited of all the different members of the Norman archipelago. The voyage from St. Peter Port, in a very small boat, and made only two or three times in a week, is dreaded, and not without reason, by those for whom rough seas have no welcome. Alderney, again, is the least foreign of the Channel Islands in local colour, though nearest France in situation; and here the old Norman patois has been entirely replaced by English. It possesses in its capital, St. Anne, a small, old-fashioned country town that is wholly without parallel anywhere else in the islands. The harbour is at Braye, a short mile north from the centre of the town; and the visitor, in strong contrast with what happens at Sark, is landed in the least romantic corner of the island. Of the old church nothing now remains but a picturesque tower, and even this does not seem to be mediÆval. The new church was erected from designs by Sir Gilbert Scott, and is, perhaps, the most striking modern building in the Channel Islands. The interior of Alderney, or Aurigny, to use the French form—

is strongly individualized, and rather wild and remote. One feels at once that this little island has a flavour of its own—a state of things no longer felt among the villadom and glass-houses of Guernsey. The strength of Alderney, however, lies chiefly in its west and south coasts; no one would visit the island except to visit these, or unless one happened to be an enthusiast for the world's neglected and inaccessible spots. I do not know how far the barbarous quarrying that was projected some six or seven years ago on the south side of the island has since been carried out, or how far it has injured the amenities of the coast. Anyhow, the Two Sisters, towards the south-west corner of the island, are hardly to be rivalled in their splintered grandeur, even in Jersey or Sark.

To Sark we come at last in our long exploration of the Channel Islands, and for Sark we may well be content to have waited patiently, and to have wandered far. For this, by universal acclamation, is certainly the gem of the whole group. Already we have often seen it in the distance—a long, level line of cliff (save where broken by the CoupÉe)—from the north coast of Jersey, or from the piers at St. Peter Port. Now, as we approach it more closely, threading the narrow strait between Herm and Jethou, and doubling the cliffs of Little Sark, at the south corner of the island, this hitherto unbroken, monotonous wall begins to resolve itself into an infinity of broken cliffs and promontories, isolating and half concealing a thousand fairy-like bays. Surely nowhere else is another coast like this—everywhere so irregular in its general trend and outline—everywhere so deeply bitten into by the mordant unrest of the sea. Sark, we have said already, is little else than coast; and certainly it is the coast which first arrests and charms us, and the coast which lingers last and most clearly in our memory, when other impressions begin to be obliterated, or vanish altogether in the steady lapse of years. Not a yard of this gracious girdle of cliff is monotonous, or repeats itself, or is even grim (as parts of the coast of Alderney are grim), or is relatively less interesting, or less beautiful, or dull; everywhere and always it is singularly lovely, and everywhere and always at the same high pitch. There is really very little to be said about Sark, except that the whole island is beautiful throughout: there is nothing to be gained by giving a long catalogue of successive promontories, caves, and bays. It was thus that Olivia made a schedule of her beauty—"item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth"—and at the end of the inventory we have no better picture of the real Olivia than before she was thus appraised in detail.

The history of Sark, for so small an island, is unusually interesting, and in some respects instructive. It is set out by Miss Carey in an interesting chapter, and some of its episodes may be summarized here. Sark, like its sister islands, must have been occupied by neolithic man, for the remains of two poor dolmens still exist in the island, and formerly, no doubt, there were very many more. St. Magloire, in the sixth century, built a chapel and founded a small monastery in the island, but apparently he found it unpopulated when first he arrived. In the middle of the fourteenth century the island was inhabited by a crew of lawless wreckers, who were a menace to the navigation of the whole Manche. The merchants of Rye and Winchelsea then put their heads together, and agreed to do by subtlety what they could not effect by force. Landing on Sark with an armed force must well-nigh have been impossible, till Helier de Carteret cut his tunnel through the rocks, when he colonized the island in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The merchants, accordingly, constructed a piece of strategy that may well have been borrowed from the Trojan horse, but in that case was certainly invested with much ingenious detail of its own. The story is told by Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World, though, as Miss Carey points out, he postdates the incident by some 200 years, and describes it as having occurred to the crew of a Flemish ship. "Yet by the industry of a gentleman of the Netherlands [the island] was in this sort regained. He anchored in the Road with one Ship, and, pretending the death of his Merchant, he besought the French that they might bury their Merchant in hallowed Ground, and in the Chapel of that Isle.... Whereto (with Condition that they should not come ashore with any Weapon, not so much as with a Knife), the French yielded. Then did the Flemings put a coffin into their Boat, not filled with a Dead Carcass, but with Swords, Targets, and Harquebuzes. The French received them at their Landing, and, searching everyone of them so narrowly as they could not hide a Penknife, gave them leave to draw their Coffin up the Rocks with great difficulty.... The Flemings on the Land, when they had carried their Coffin into the Chapel, shut the Door to them, and, taking their Weapons out of the Coffin, set upon the French."

The final settlement of Sark—which the French call Serq—dates only from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when Helier de Carteret established himself on the then deserted island, and planted there forty families, whom he brought from his native Jersey. He also built a church, and instituted a Presbyterian Vicar, CosmÉ Brevint—being himself a Presbyterian—who continued to hold office till his death in 1576, being one who spared, or flattered, no one, "great or small, in his reprehensions." It is rightly said that the constitution of Sark is still largely feudal in character. The land is parcelled out into the original forty holdings, and some of these are said still to be held by descendants of the original holders. The lord of the island is still the Seigneur, though the lordship has passed from the hands of the de Carterets—it is said that they were compelled to part with it by reason of their lavish expenditure on the thankless Stuart cause. In the so-called "Battery" at the back of the Manor-House is one of the old guns that were given by Elizabeth to Helier de Carteret. It is inscribed, "Don de Sa MajestÉ la Royne Elizabeth, au Seigneur de Serq, A.D. 1572."

Of the smaller islands of the Norman archipelago only a word or two need be added here. Roughly halfway between Sark and Guernsey, and separated from each other by a narrow passage that is difficult to navigate by reason of its hidden rocks and surging tides, are the small twin islands of Jethou and Herm. The latter is now occupied by a German Prince, the great-grandson of the famous Prussian leader, the exact place of whose meeting with Wellington after the field of Waterloo—whether at Belle Alliance, or farther along the road towards Genappe—has often been made the topic of historical discussion, and is anyhow the subject of a well-known picture. Jethou is considerably the smaller of the two, and is principally devoted to the purpose of a rabbit-warren. In Herm are some remains of the old Chapel of St. Tugual, incorporated with the outbuildings of the present manor-house. Previous to 1770 Herm was inhabited by deer; and Mr. Bicknell tells us that they "used to take advantage of the tide to swim over to the Vale in Guernsey to feed, returning on the next tide." Certainly it is lucky that there are now no deer in Herm, since they would not find much pasture now at Vale.

Jethou and Herm belong to Guernsey, and once, no doubt, were physically parts of it. As seen from St. Peter Port, with Sark dimly descried on the distant horizon, they still contribute largely to Guernsey's most charming seascape. Alderney and Sark, again, have each their attendant isle. Jersey alone, though the biggest of them all, is a planet without a satellite. The islet peculiar to Sark is Brecqhou, or the Ile des Marchants, which lies off its west coast, and is separated from it by the narrow Gouliot Strait, only a few hundred yards wide. Though measuring more than seventy acres, and possessed of a small landing-place, it is at present as innocent of human habitation as was Sark itself immediately before the coming of Helier de Carteret. Burhou is situated at a considerably greater distance to the north-west of Alderney, from which it is separated by the never-resting Swinge. This is, perhaps, the least visited among all the lesser islands, as is Alderney itself among the major four.