We can return to Canterbury by another and more pleasant route than that by which we came. Following the road uphill, past the pretty cottage where we obtained the keys of the church, we turn to the right, so gaining a cleanly field path. Before us rise low grassy knolls; behind us, screened by trees, the spire of Fordwich church and the gables of its houses and cottages; on our right hand the broad, flat valley of the Stour, the Sturry Road marked by the straight line of trees. Bobbing up and down goes the path, so that we scarcely note that we are gradually ascending, until suddenly we find ourselves high up, looking down on the outskirts of Canterbury; beneath us the trumpets ring out from the barracks notes of modernity and echoes of old fighting days; before us soars the tower of the Cathedral, shrouded--when we saw it--in mists and wisps of falling rain; on our left the level ground where the cavalry exercise. Along this track for sure, when in old days the valley was a swamp, many a weary traveller has toiled from the coast unto the old city; how their hearts must have leaped within them as they saw rising there the Angel Steeple, perhaps bathed in the rays of the setting sun, perchance veiled in sorrowful clouds. As did we, so must they have passed on down the slope to St Martin’s Church, and so to the city gate, now vanished. It is but a short walk this which we have taken, short in the distance we traverse, but it takes us back to dim, far gone ages; now the train, with its pennant of white, thunders along the valley, where of old coracles have floated, and we return from our visit to a village that may be called a mile-stone on the road of history, to a great cathedral city, where Britons shivered in mud and wicker hovels on the reedy islets of the Stour. On a fresh and breezy morning, the sky washed clean by the rain and flecked with thin white clouds, we walked out by the West Gate on our way to Harbledown, by many held to be Chaucer’s “little town” which “y-cleped is Bob-up-and-down, Under [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, ST MARTIN’S CHURCH TOWER, AND HARBLEDOWN From the Priory Garden, Canterbury]