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For the Valley of the Rother breeds men and is the cause of many delightful villages, all the homes of men. I know that Cobden was born there, the last of the yeomen: I hope that Cobbett lived here too. In the Valley of the River Rother no hurried men ever come, for it leads nowhere.

To the east, across the flat emptiness, the Rother crawls seaward; to the west across the Marsh, as once across the sea, Winchelsea rises against the woods, and beyond, far away, the darkness of Fairlight hangs like a cloud twixt sea and sky.

I catch myself pretending an interest in Rother's column, but really actuated by a desire to plant myself in his mind, and to have a notice in his paper about me ... anything that Dad Rother has in his column is copied in all the Kansas papers. I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the use of a typewriter.

This Rother also all good men know and love, both those that come in for pleasure, strangers of Kent, and those that have a distant birthright in East Sussex, being born beyond Ouse in the Rape of Bramber.

We were fifteen men in the room; none of us were anything like rich enough to hunt, and the lie went through them like an express. All this he told, and there was not even a man there to ask him whether all those little dogs and horses swam the Rother or jumped it. He was treated like a god; they tried to make him stop but he would not.

This dead man was a sailor from the Rother Adler, the great German battleship that had we but known it lay not four miles away along the coast amidst ploughed-up mountains of chalk ooze, a torn and battered mass of machinery, wholly submerged at high water, and holding in its interstices nine hundred drowned brave men, all strong and skilful, all once capable of doing fine things. . . .

Then, in a low, sweet voice, scarcely louder than a whisper, he told how he had watched for her and met her now and then when she went abroad, but was all too afraid in her sweet presence to speak to her, until at last, beside the banks of Rother, he had spoken of his love, and she had whispered that which had made his heartstrings quiver for joy.

The Rother into which the foreigners sailed for so many hundred years, the River of the Marshes, the river on which stands Rye; the easy Rother along whose deep meadows are the sloping kilns, the bright-tilted towns and the steep roads; the red Rother that is fed by streams from the ironstone.

"And our rother dear young friends," she was beginning, when suddenly she put her hands up to her face and made a curious spluttering noise, at sound of which the sisters started in dismay. She recovered herself at once, and continued her harangue with redoubled energy; but suspicion had been aroused, and could not easily be allayed. That laugh!

The three marshes are much alike; indeed to the foreigner they are all a single spread of green, slatted with watercourses. No river crosses them, for the Rother curves close under Rye Hill, though these marshes were made by its ancient mouth, when it was the River Limine and ran into the Channel at Old Romney.