der than Caesar, was in fact used as the tomb of the
hero whose immortality Caesar insured by naming him in his
Commentaries. Who knows? If Julaber is not a corruption of Laberius as
the old antiquaries asserted, and as the people here about believe,
one likes to think it might be, for no other explanation of this
strange name is forthcoming.

So I went on through King's wood, and as I came out of it southward I
saw a wonderful thing. For I saw before me that division or part of
the world which stands quite separate from any other and is not
Europe, Asia, Africa nor America, but Romney Marsh. It lay there
under the sunset half lost in its own mists, far off across the near
meadows of the Weald, for I was now upon the southern escarpment of
the North Downs and in the foreground rose the town of Ashford where
I was to sleep. It was twilight and more, however, before I reached
it, for in those woods I heard for the first time that year the
nightingale, and my heart, which all day had been full of Rome, was
suddenly changed, so that I went down through the dusk to Ashford,
singing an English song:

By a bank as I lay, I lay,
Musing on things past, heigh ho!
In the merry month of May
O towards the close of day--
Methought I heard at last--
O the gentle nightingale,
The lady and the mistress of all musick;
She sits down ever in the dale
Singing with her notes smale
And quavering them wonderfully thick.
O for joy my spirits were quick
To hear the bird how merrily she could sing,
And I said, good Lord, defend
England with Thy most holy hand
And save noble George our King.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WEALD AND THE MARSH

Ashford as we see it to-day, a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants,
is altogether a modern place and really in the worst sense, for it
owes its importance and its ugliness to the railway; it is a big
junction and the site of the engineering works of the South Eastern
and Chatham Company. Lacking as it is in almost all material
antiquity, it has little that is beautiful to show us, a fine church
with a noble tower that has been rather absurdly compared with the
Angel Steeple at Canterbury--nothing more--and its history is almost
as meagre. It stands, the first town of the Kentish Weald, where the
East Stour flows into the Great Stour, in the very mouth of the dee