“There,” I thought, “is a type quite expressive of all England in its rural form. Pictures of England have been teaching me that all my life.” I went into the church, which was located on the site of one built in the thirteenth century--and on the wall near the door was a list of the resident vicars and their patrons, beginning with some long-since-forgotten soul. The monks and the abbots of the pre-Reformation period were indicated and the wars of the Reformation also. I think that bridge which I had crossed had been destroyed by Cromwell and rebuilt only sixty or seventy years before, but my memory is not good and I will not guarantee these facts. From the church we went out into the street and found an old stock inside an iron fence, dating from some older day where they punished people after that fashion. We came to a store which was signaled by a low, small-paned window let into a solid gray wall, where were chocolates and candies and foreign-manufactured goods with labels I had never seen before. It is a strange sensation to go away from home and leave all your own familiar patent medicines and candies and newspapers and whiskies and journey to some place where they never saw or heard of them. Here was Marlowe, and lovely as it was, I kept saying to myself, “Yes, yes, it is delicious, but how terrible it would be to live here! I couldn’t. It’s a dead world. We have passed so far beyond this.” I walked through the pretty streets as smooth and clean as though they had been brushed and between rows of low, gray, winding houses which curved in pretty lines, but for the life of me I could not help swinging between the joy of art for that which is alive and the sorrow for something that is gone and will never be, any more. Everything, everything spoke to me of an older day. These houses--all of them were lower than they need be, grayer than they need be, thicker, older, sadder. I could not think of gas or electricity being used here, although they were, or of bright broad windows, open plumbing, modern street cars, a stock of modern, up-to-date goods, which I am sure they contained. I was impressed by a grave silence which is apathetic to me as nothing else--a profound peace. “I must get out of this,” I said to myself, and yet I was almost hugging myself for joy at the same time. I remember going into one courtyard where an inn might once have been and finding in there a furniture shop, a tin shop, a store room of some kind and a stable, all invisible from the street. Do you recall Dickens’ description of busy inn scenes? You came into this one under the chamber belonging to a house which was built over the entry way. There was no one visible inside, though a man did cross the court finally with a wheel spoke in his hand. One of the houses or shops had a little circular cupola on it, quite white and pretty and surmounted by a faded weather cock. “How lovely,” I said, “how lovely,” but I was as sad as I could be.