For hundreds of years the people of England looked upon Becket as a martyr and a saint, and went on pilgrimage to visit his tomb. One company of pilgrims lives for ever in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer, the great fourteenth-century poet; they ride from London to Canterbury in a right merry fellowship, and tell tales to pass the time on the way--the ever-famous "Canterbury Pilgrims." But throngs without number of wayfarers who have found no such splendid chronicler marched to the city where the bones of the martyr lay under Bell Harry Tower, and their offerings made the shrine glorious with gold and gems. A Venetian who saw the shrine about the year 1500 says: "The tomb of St. Thomas the Martyr, Archbishop of Canterbury, exceeds all belief. Notwithstanding its great size, it is wholly covered with plates of pure gold; yet the gold is scarcely seen because it is covered with various precious stones, as sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds; and wherever the eye turns something more beautiful than the rest is observed." This shrine blazed with gold and jewels until the Reformation, when it was destroyed and its treasures seized by Henry VIII.; to-day nothing of it remains. The second greatest memory of the cathedral is that of the Black Prince; his tomb stands in the chapel where once stood the shrine of Becket. "A splendid figure of romance he was--a great fighter, and, as such, beloved of his race; the boy victor of Cressy; the conqueror at Poitiers, where the French King became his captive; in his life the glory of his country, by his untimely death leaving it to anarchy and civil war. We stand by his tomb, looking upon his effigy, which is life-like in its strength. 'There he lies: no other memorial of him exists in the world so authentic. There he lies, as he had directed, in full armour, his head resting on his helmet, his feet with the likeness of "the spurs he won" at Cressy, his hands joined as in that last prayer which he had offered up on his death-bed.' Above the canopy hang his gauntlets, his helm, his velvet coat that once blazed with the arms of England and of France, and the empty scabbard of his sword." But when we have looked upon all the solemn beauties of the great church; when we have seen the quaintly beautiful old houses of the city about it; when we have visited St. Martin's, the oldest church in England; when we have walked round Dune John, that mysterious mound which no one can explain, still we must not leave without seeing the oldest by far of all the old things of this old city.