nduring and most beautiful possession as a child looks upon his
mother, really with unseeing eyes, unable to tell whether she be fair
or no, understanding indeed but this that she is a part of himself,
and that he loves her more than anything else in the world.

But that glorious way in all its fulness was not for me. I had
determined to follow the Pilgrims' Road but a little way, indeed but
for one long day's journey, so far only as Boghton Aluph, where it
turns that great corner westward and proceeds along the rampart of the
Downs. But even in the ten miles twixt Canterbury and Boghton, that
ancient way gives to him who follows it wonderful things.

To begin with, the valley of the Stour. There can be few valleys in
this part of England more lovely than this steep and wide vale,
through the hop gardens, the woods and meadows of which, the Great
Stour proceeds like a royal pilgrim, half in state to Canterbury, and
on to the mystery of the marshes, and its death in the sea. Above
Canterbury certainly, and all along my way, there is not a meadow nor
a wood, nor indeed a single mile of that landscape, which has not been
contrived and created by man, by the love and labour of our fathers
through how many thousand years. And this is part of the virtue of
England, that it is as it were a garden of our making, a pleasaunce we
have built, a paradise and a home after our own hearts. And in that
divine and tireless making we, without knowing it, have so moulded
ourselves that we are one with it, it is a part of us, a part of our
character and nature. There lie ever before us our beginnings, the
earthworks we once defended, the graves we built, the defeats, the
victories, the holy places. By these a man lives, out of these he
draws slowly and with a sort of confidence the uncertain future, glad
indeed of this divine assurance that there is nothing new under the
sun.

Such monuments of an antiquity so great that they have no history but
what may be gathered from barrows and stones, accompany one upon any
day's journey in southern England, but it is only in one place that a
man can stand and say: Here began the history of my country. That
place as it happens lies as it should upon the Pilgrims' Road.

Beyond Harbledown, some two miles from Canterbury, he Pilgrims' Road
along the hillside passes clean through earthwork of unknown antiquity.
Well, it was here the Seventh Legion charged: here, indeed, we stand
upon the very battle