In
those days, between the Abbey and the sea, there stood a town of
seven towers and four rich churches, surrounded by a wall of twelve
stones' thickness, making it, as men reckoned then, a place of
strength and much import; and the monks, glancing their eyes
downward from the Abbey garden on the hill, saw beneath their feet
its narrow streets, gay with the ever passing of rich merchandise,
saw its many wharves and water-ways, ever noisy with the babel of
strange tongues, saw its many painted masts, wagging their grave
heads above the dormer roofs and quaintly-carved oak gables.
Thus the town prospered till there came a night when it did evil in
the sight of God and man. Those were troublous times to Saxon
dwellers by the sea, for the Danish water-rats swarmed round each
river mouth, scenting treasure from afar; and by none was the white
flash of their sharp, strong teeth more often seen than by the men
of Eastern Anglia, and by none in Eastern Anglia more often than by
the watchers on the walls of the town of seven towers that once
stood upon the dry land, but which now lies twenty fathom deep
below the waters.
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