Nowhere in the country will you find so many of these old houses; some of them in part dating back to the fourteenth century; and Dickens felt the charm of them. Many are now hidden behind ugly modern fronts, but many are yet unspoiled. Doubtless some of these in St. Dunstan's Street took in belated pilgrims who arrived after curfew and the shutting of the city gate. Just outside Westgate is the old Falstaff Inn, with its sign suspended from a remarkable bracket of fifteenth-century ironwork. This reminds us that before the era of coal mining in the north, Kentish men were craftsmen in iron, obtaining unlimited fuel from the forest of the Weald. Doubtless there were Kentish pikes and blades, Kentish helmets and hauberks, at Cressy and Poitiers, at Agincourt, in the Wars of the Roses, and at Flodden. While we are looking at old houses let us pass through Westgate (we will return in a moment) and visit the Canterbury Weavers, shown in our illustration. It rises sheer from the water, and its windows "bulge" over the water, where the river crosses the street near Eastbridge Hospital. It is, in spite of repairs and restorations, a fifteenth-century building, and, as viewed from the bridge, not less picturesque than a nook of Bruges or Ghent. [Illustration: CANTERBURY FROM THE STOUR (_Page 11_)] Eastbridge Hospital, just opposite, belongs to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but is not a specimen of domestic architecture. It is a charitable foundation which survived Tudor confiscations through the intercession of Cranmer, and still shelters its aged poor. Somewhat farther, on the same side, is No. 37, a French silk-weaver's house, built in the fifteenth century for one of the refugees from religious persecution. It is almost unchanged: the ground floor is the shop, the first floor is for the family and the loom, and the story above has its door for receiving the bales of silk hauled up from the street. We must not wander farther without turning to look at Westgate, the last remaining of Canterbury's seven city gates and the best thing of its kind in the kingdom. With its round flanking towers and its massive portal, it takes us back in a moment to the fourteenth century, and makes us wonder and sigh that citizens could have had the heart to destroy its fellows. For even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century the walls and gates of the ancient town were almost intact. With grim amusement, not unmixed with disgust, we recall the story that once the Town Council was equally divided on the proposition that it should be pulled down to admit the huge caravans of Wombwell's Wild Beast Show. It was saved only by the casting vote of the Mayor, to whose common sense it occurred to make a way round it. And that Mayor, not the least of Canterbury's worthies, is not even yet commemorated by-- "Colossal bust Or column trophied for triumphal show".