uch the itinerary of Chaucer's pilgrims.

Southwark's Tabard Inn exists to-day, in name if not in spirit, and
it was easy enough to take it for our starting-point. Getting out of
London to the southeast is not as bad as by the northwest, but in all
conscience it is bad enough, through Deptford and its docks, and
Greenwich and Woolwich, and over the Plumstead marshes. There are
variants of this itinerary, we were told, but all are equally smelly
and sooty, and it was only well after we had passed Gravesend that we
felt that we had really left town behind, and even then we could see
the vermilion stacks of great steamships making their way up London's
river to the left, and the mouse-brown sails of the barges going
round the coast to Ipswich and Yarmouth.

At last a stretch of green unsmoked and unspoiled country, that via
Stroud to Rochester, came into view.

Rochester on the Medway, with its memories of Mr. Pickwick and the
Bull Inn (still remaining), the cathedral and Gad's Hill, Dickens's
home near by, is a literary shrine of the first importance. We
stopped _en route_ and did our duty, but were soon on our way again
through the encumbered main street of Chatham and up the long hill to
Sittingbourne, itself a dull, respectable market-town with a boiled
mutton and grilled kipper inn which offers no inducements to a
gormand to stop for lunch.

We kept on to Canterbury and didn't do much better at a hotel which
shall be nameless. The hotels are all bad at Canterbury, according to
Continental standards, and there is little choice between them.

It is said that the oldest inn in England is "The Fountain" at
Canterbury. "The Fountain" claims to have housed the wife of Earl
Godwin when she came to meet her husband on his return from Denmark
in the year 1029, and to have been the temporary residence of
Archbishop Lanfranc whilst his palace was being rebuilt in 1070.
There is a legend, too, that the four knights who murdered Thomas a
Becket made this house their rendezvous. Moreover, "The Fountain" can
boast of a testimonial to its excellence as an inn written six
hundred years ago, for, when the marriage of Edward the First to his
second queen, Margaret of France, was solemnized at Canterbury
Cathedral on September 12, 1299, the ambassador of the Emperor of
Germany, who was among the distinguished guests, wrote thus to his
master: "The inns in England are the best in Europe, those of
Canterbury are the best in England,