faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea." From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a service in the choir, but it was well over and I had the place to myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his presence it was possible to feel a certain personal nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of