became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed. To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named. Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history. "Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper. That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically assures us. "He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for his fiddlers three." Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity, _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_. XXVII THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back door into the town. Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only way to or from London into the town.