ed, and
out of the wood there came towards me a man, and I knew it was the
Lord Christ. And I went on to meet Him. And when I was come to Him I
said: "I shall never understand what You mean ... I shall never
understand what You mean. For You say the meek shall inherit the
earth.... I shall never understand what You mean."

And He looked at me and smiled, and stretching forth His hands and
looking all about He answered: "But I spoke of the flowers."

CHAPTER VII

THE VALLEY OF THE STOUR

CAESAR IN KENT

It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I
set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the
shoulder of Harbledown, some little way past St Dunstan's, turned out
of the Watling Street, south and west into the old green path or
trackway, which, had I followed it to the end, would have brought me
right across Kent and Surrey and Hampshire to Winchester the old
capital of England. This trackway, far older than history, would
doubtless have perished utterly, as so many of its fellows have done,
but for two very different events, the first of which was the
Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls
upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the
eighteenth century. For this ancient British track leading half across
England of my heart, a barbarous thing, older than any written word
in England, was used and preserved, when, with the full blossoming of
the Middle Age in the thirteenth century, it might have disappeared.
It was preserved by the Pilgrims to St Thomas's Shrine. All those men
who came out of the West to visit St Thomas, all those who came from
Brittany, central and southern France and Spain, gathered at
Winchester, the old capital of the Kingdom, and when they set out
thence for Canterbury this was the way they followed across the
counties; this most ancient way which enters Canterbury hand in hand
with the Watling Street by the West Gate.

To describe a thing so ancient is impossible. It casts a spell upon
the traveller so that as he follows under its dark yews across the
steep hop gardens of Kent from hillside to hillside, up this valley or
that, along the mighty south wall of the North Downs to the great ford
of the Medway, and beyond and beyond through more than a hundred miles
to Winchester he loses himself; becomes indeed one with his
forefathers and looks upon that dear and ancient landscape, his most
e