buried at his own request "just at sunrising in the nearest parish church within his own diocese." GLASTONBURY, a small market-town of some 4000 people in the centre of the county, 6 m. S. from Wells. It has a station on the S. & D. line from Evercreech to Bridgwater. The site of Glastonbury is almost as conspicuous in a Somerset landscape as its name is in Somerset history. Its huge conical tor, crowned by a tower, rises like a gigantic sugar-loaf from the surrounding plain, and is visible to half the county. The neighbourhood is a happy hunting-ground for the antiquary, and one of the "regulation" sights for the casual tourist. No one can be said to have "done" Somerset who has not seen Glastonbury. Its associations are romantic as well as historical. Though the modern town is commonplace enough, poetry and piety, fact and fiction, have conspired to make it famous. Here was the cradle of British Christianity. In this "deep meadowed island, fair with orchard lawns"--the fabled _Avalon_--blossomed the flower of British chivalry in the persons of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. It was when a Glastonbury monk that Dunstan made his vigorous onslaught on the powers of darkness. And it was this "parcel of ground," already consecrated by the bones of St Patrick, King Edgar, and St David, which became the favourite burying-place of mediaeval saints and heroes. The legend which accounted for its early pre-eminence is even in these sceptical days worth retelling, for from its popularity the future importance of the abbey sprang. Joseph of Arimathaea was despatched by St Philip along with eleven companions "to carry the tidings of the blessed Gospel" to the shores of remote Britain. Providential winds wafted them across the waters of the Severn Sea, and at length the wayworn travellers landed at Glastonbury, then an island. As their leader, like Jacob, leant in worship on the top of his staff on Wearyall Hill, the rod took root and became a thorn tree, which blossomed every year as surely as the Feast of the Nativity came round. The "Holy Grail" (the cup of blessing from the Last Supper), which Joseph brought with him, he buried at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, and from the place of its sepulchre gushed forth the Bloody Spring, which may be duly inspected to this day. The pilgrims made more friends than disciples, and the king, after a dilatory conversion, set apart for the maintenance of the newcomers "twelve hides of land." Here the evangelists possessed their souls in patience and built for worship a little shrine of wattle and daub, which was many generations afterwards found intact when fresh missionaries came to re-evangelise the islanders. Round this _vetusta ecclesia_ gathered the subsequent glories of the monastery. This long-cherished tradition enshrines sufficient fact to justify Glastonbury's claim to be "the only tie still abiding between the vanished Church of the Briton and the Church