[_To face p. 218_] The inflowing of the sea made islands not only of Glastonbury, but of Athelney, Beckery, and Meare; and not many centuries ago, when a tempest raged, the sea-wall was broken down and the Channel waters swept up the low-lying land almost as far as Glastonbury Church. The simple record of this event reads: “The breach of the sea-flood was January 20th, 1606.” Again in 1703 was Glastonbury threatened with a deluge, and the water was five feet deep in its streets; but as geologists are able to affirm that the sea is receding from the western coast it is unlikely that such catastrophes will recur. A little lazy stream, the Brue, almost engirdles the city, and thus permits the inhabitants with seeming reasonableness to retain for Glastonbury the name loved best--the Isle of Avalon. That Roman name has been full of dreamy suggestiveness to the poet’s mind; and though the poet’s Avalon may often have been an enchanted city, the “baseless fabric of a vision,” the Avalon of Somerset, with its two streets forming a perfect cross, its Abbey ruins, its antiquities, and its slumbrous aspect, is assuredly not unworthy of the legends clustering about it. Only by devious paths can Glastonbury, once the remote shrine for devout pilgrims from all parts of the land, be reached, for it is still somewhat out of the common track. But to wander awhile in the apple-country is delightful alike to the mind and the physical sense--to drink in its associations, to inhale its warm, sweet air, to see the gleam of white blossoms and the crimson softening upon the round ripened cheeks of the pendent fruit, these are the sources of enjoyment and the elements of the charm. Countless gardens send forth a rare perfume, and the quiet of the whole city in the midst of orchards and streams and showing the relics of by-gone splendour has a lulling effect upon the traveller who comes from the roaring town and the busy mart. When the twin dark towers of Wells Cathedral are fading shadow-like in the distance the new strange picture of the island-valley is revealed. There stretch the long level meadows of deep emerald, there glooms a forest of trees whose twisted branches are bright with apple-blossoms. The high Tor hill looks stern and bare, but cosy and inviting is the town below with its rows of irregular houses, many of which date back to long past days, while others, constituted of stone with which the architects of Dunstan’s and of Becket’s time wrought, seem to bear mute tribute to the famous era when the Abbey was in its glory and reverend pilgrims from afar came to bring oblations to that hallowed shrine. To-day the visitor finds a welcome at the “Inne” built in 1475 for the devout travellers whom the Abbot could not accommodate within the walls of the Abbey; and so few are the changes of time that the lofty façade, the parapet and turrets, the wide archway, the ecclesiastical windows, and the long corridors, remain