Jerusalem.... Standing there so near to the roar of London, yet centuries away from it, I recalled white nights on the Mount of Olives, the Holy City spread below over its hills, a dome rising up from violet shadow into the moonlight, a group of cypress trees pointing dark fingers to the stars, and from the faint ribbon of road the trit-trot of a donkey's hoofs going on to Bethany. The link with Jerusalem is true and straight. It was after they returned from the First Crusade that the Templars built this church to remind them of the round church that guarded the grave of Christ. There are only three others like it in the country, at Cambridge, Northampton, and Little Maplestead, Essex. This church was conceived in Palestine. As I looked at it I recalled the waxen face of a monk whose thin beard was like black silk. I met him in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I had been torn here and there by the confused crowds of pilgrims. I had been mixed up in various sacred processions, I had seen the hungry fervour in which those anxious for salvation had kissed the end of a stick after it had been poked through a hole in an arch so that it might touch a fragment of the Column of the Scourging. And I went on towards the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, six foot by six foot, in whose tiny space hang forty-three lamps. Here I saw a poor Greek woman creep in and fall into a torrent of tears on that marble slab which hides the tombstone of Christ. The monk met me outside, such a smooth wax fellow, and led me to a little chapel in which he produced a pair of old spurs and a sword with a hilt shaped like a cross. Godfrey de Bouillon's! So he said. I whispered the name in the Round Church. It all links up. * * * So quiet it is to-day in the safe keeping of the law. You would never dream that these lawns sloping to the Thames were eight hundred years ago the beginning of that long, hard road to Palestine, the nest of the Templars, those priest warriors who began their history so splendidly poor that two men rode one horse, and ended so richly and dangerously that two kings and the Pope of Rome broke them as three millionaires might smash a trust. Nothing now remains of all this ancient fire but the Round Church and a few stone crusaders lying with their feet towards the east. A few names linger on, their meaning quite changed. The serjeant-at-law owes his title to the "Fratres Servientes," the serving brothers of the Templars; and the judges' title of "Knight" of the Common Pleas takes us back eight hundred years. Between the crusaders lying cap-à-pie with Paynim knights beneath their spurred heels, are two brass tablets let into the floor. One is in memory of the members of the Inner Temple, and the other of members of the Middle Temple who laid down their lives in the war. * * *