Well, here my experience as an artillery officer accustomed to getting gun-carriages out of predicaments enabled me at once to assume authority, and drawing up a camp stool I gave them directions as they worked. They did not, it is true, listen much, thinking as English people so invariably do that they knew better, but by not listening they merely added another half-hour to their labour, and as it was fine and warm and sitting superintending them much less arduous than marching, I had no real objection. I told Menzies-Legh this at the time, but he did not answer, so I told him again when we were on the road about the half-hour he might have saved if he had worked on my plan. He seemed to be in a more than usually bad temper, for he only shrugged his shoulders and looked glum; and my hearers will agree that Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s John was not a possession for England to be specially proud of. We journeyed that day toward Canterbury, a town you, my friends, may or may not have heard of. That it is an English town I need not say, for if it were not would we have been going there? And it is chiefly noted, I remembered, for its archbishop. This gentleman, I was told by Jellaby on my questioning him, walks directly behind the King’s eldest son, and in front of all the nobles in processions. He is a pastor, but how greatly glorified! He is the final expansion, the last word, of that which in the bud was only a curate. Every English curate, like Buonaparte’s soldiers are said to have done, carries in his handbag the mitre of an archbishop. I can only regard it as a blessing that our Church has not got them, for I for one would find it difficult with this possibility in view ever to be really natural to a curate. As it is I am perfectly natural. With absolute simplicity I show ours his place and keep him to it; and I am equally simple with our Superintendents and General Superintendents, the nearest approach our pure and frugal Church goes to bishops and archbishops. There is nothing glorified about them. They are just respectable elderly men, with God-fearing wives who prepare their dinner for them day by day. “And, Jellaby,” said I, “can as much be said for the wives of your archbishops?” “No,” said he. “Another point, then,” said I, with the jesting manner one uses to gild unpalatable truth, “on which we Germans are ahead.” Jellaby pushed his wisp of hair back and mopped his forehead. From my position at my horse’s head I had called to him as he was walking quickly past me, for I perceived he had my poor gentle little friend in tow and was once again inflicting his society on her. He could not, however, refuse to linger on my addressing him, and I took care to ask him so many questions about Canterbury and its ecclesiastical meaning that Frau von Eckthum was able to have a little rest.