It is not strange then, that it
should cool with its shade the spring of St Thomas; it is only strange
that the vandal has spared it for us to bless. But why the elder was
sacred to travellers I do not know.

Wayfaring Tree! What ancient claim
Hast thou to that right pleasant name?
Was it that some faint pilgrim came
Unhopedly to thee
In the brown desert's weary way
'Midst thirst and toils consuming sway,
And there, as 'neath thy shade he lay,
Blessed the Wayfaring Tree?

But doggerel never solved anything. In truth a very different story is
told of the elder and on good authority too. For if we may not trust
Sir John Maundeville who tells us that, "Fast by the Pool of Siloe is
the elder tree on which Judas hanged himself ... when he sold and
betrayed our Lord," Shakespeare says that, "Judas was hanged on an
elder," and Piers Plowman records:

Judas he japed
With Jewish siller
And sithen on an elder tree
Hanged himsel.

It is from the quietness and neglected beauty of this well of St
Thomas that under the evening I turned back into the road and,
climbing a little, looked down upon what was once the holiest city of
fair England.

Felix locus, felix ecclesia
In qua Thomae vivit memoria:
Felix terra quae dedit praesulem
Felix ilia quae fovit exsulem.

In that hour of twilight, when even the modern world is hushed and it
is possible to believe in God, I looked with a long look towards that
glory which had greeted so often and for so many centuries the eager
gaze of my ancestors, but I could not see for my eyes like theirs were
full of tears.

CHAPTER VI

THE CITY OF ST THOMAS

When a man, alone or in a company, entered Canterbury at last by the
long road from London, in the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth
century, he came into a city as famous as Jerusalem, as lovely as
anything even in England, and as certainly alive and in possession of a
soul as he was himself.

When a man comes into Canterbury to-day he comes into a dead city.

I say Canterbury is dead, for when the soul has departed from the body,
that is death. Canterbury has lost its soul.

Go into the Cathedral, it is like a tomb, but a tomb that has been
rifled, a whited sepulchre so void and cold that even the last trump
will make there no stir. It was once the altar, the shrine, an