There are Canterbury Pilgrims every Sunday in summer who start from close to the old Tabard, only they go by the South-Eastern Railway and come back the same day for five shillings. And, what is more, they are just the same sort of people. If they do not go to Canterbury they go by the _Clacton Belle_ to Clacton-on-Sea. There is not a Sunday the whole summer through but you may find all Chaucer’s pilgrims, man and woman for man and woman, on board the _Lord of the Isles_ or the _Clacton Belle_. Why, I have seen the Wife of Bath on the _Lord of the Isles_ myself. She was eating her luncheon off an _Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday_, which was spread out upon her knees. Whether it was I who had had too much beer or she I cannot tell, God knoweth; and whether or no I was caught up into Paradise, again I cannot tell; but I certainly did hear unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter, and that not above fourteen years ago but the very last Sunday that ever was. The Wife of Bath heard them too, but she never turned a hair. Luckily I had my detective camera with me, so I snapped her there and then. She put her hand up to her mouth at that very moment and rather spoiled herself, but not much. [1891.] Horace at the Post-Office in Rome When I was in Rome last summer whom should I meet but Horace. I did not know him at first, and told him enquiringly that the post-office was in the Piazza Venezia? He smiled benignly, shrugged his shoulders, said “Prego” and pointed to the post-office itself, which was over the way and, of course, in the Piazza S. Silvestro. Then I knew him. I believe he went straight home and wrote an epistle to Mecænas, or whatever the man’s name was, asking how it comes about that people who travel hundreds of miles to see things can never see what is all the time under their noses. In fact, I saw him take out his note-book and begin making notes at once. He need not talk. He was not a good man of business and I do not believe his books sold much better than my own. But this does not matter to him now, for he has not the faintest idea that he ever wrote any of them and, more likely than not, has never even refreshed his memory by reading them. Beethoven at Faido and at Boulogne I have twice seen people so unmistakably like Beethoven (just as Madame Patey is unmistakably like Handel and only wants dressing in costume to be the image of him not in features only but in figure and air and manner) that I always think of them as Beethoven.