Wite ye nat wher ther stant a litel town Which that y-cleped is Bop-up-and-down Under the Blee in Caunterbury weye? This "littel town" it might seem, has disappeared, unless indeed it be Harbledown itself, which certainly bears geographically much resemblance to that descriptive name, as Erasmus describes it in his strange book. "Know then," says he, "that those who journey to London, not long after leaving Canterbury, find themselves in a road at once very hollow and narrow and besides the banks on either side are so steep and abrupt that you cannot escape; nor can you possibly make your journey in any other direction. Upon the left hand of this road is a hospital of a few old men, one of whom runs out as soon as they perceive any horseman approaching; he sprinkles his holy water and presently offers the upper part of a shoe bound with an iron hoof on which is a piece of glass resembling a precious stone. Those that kiss it give some small coin.... Gratian rode on my left hand, next to the hospital, he was covered with water; however he endured that. When the shoe was stretched out, he asked the man what he wanted. He said that it was the shoe of St Thomas. On that my friend was angered and turning to me he said, 'What, do these brutes imagine that we must kiss every good man's shoe? Why, by the same rule, they would offer his spittle to be kissed or other bodily excrements.' I pitied the old man, and by the gift of a small coin I comforted his trouble." It is easy to see that we are there in the modern world on the very eve of the Reformation. The unmannerly Gratian was John Colet to be the Dean of St Paul's, hardly defended from the charge of heresy by old Archbishop Wareham. And like so many of his kidney he seems to have forgotten the scripture upon which, as he would have asserted, his whole philosophy and action was based,--the scripture I mean which speaks of One, "the lachet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." We shall not have the opportunity of being so proud and impatient as Dean Colet of unhappy memory, for no shoe, alas, of St Thomas or any other saint will be offered for our veneration in the Hospital of St Nicholas at Harbledown to-day. Yet not for this should we pass it by, for of all places upon the road, it best of all conserves the memory of those far away days when Chaucer came by, and half-way up the hill rested awhile and prayed, e'er from the summit he looked down upon Canterbury.