David's Psalms to the crowds that moved by him as they passed over the bridge of Avon. These venerable foundations, about whose origin a glamour of mystery had gathered, whose history had become strangely obscured by the body of myths that had grown up in the lapse of centuries--which had survived pillage and anarchy, and all the horrors of fire and sword, desolating, devastating--were there before men's eyes, testifying to the amazing vitality which a millennium of strange vicissitude had not only not destroyed, but not even impaired. Such a mighty pile of buildings, as had risen up to heaven there in the old Roman town of Verulam, appealed to the imagination of mankind--the very materials of the massive tower, ruddy in the blaze of the noon-day, must have been a wonder and astonishment to many an awe-struck pilgrim perplexed at the first sight of Roman bricks burnt on the spot a thousand years ago. There stood the mighty Roman rampart, vast, enormous--the ground beneath his feet teeming with the tangible memories of grisly conflict, or of an old civilization that had been blotted out long ago--the swords of Roman legionaries, the bones of British heroes, coins with legends that few could read turned up by the ploughman's share. Yonder, men said, away there at Redburn, the heathen pursuers had come upon England's proto-martyr and slain the saint of God, whose bones since then had been gathered up, and were now resting in their sumptuous shrine. When the Norman came, and the new order was set up in the land--not a day before it was needed--the thirteenth Abbot of St. Alban's was of the blood royal, and heir, they said, to Cnut, the Danish king, who had passed away. It was to him that the awful Conqueror made oath he would bind himself by the Confessor's laws, an oath which, if he ever meant to keep, he meant to interpret according to his mood. Even the very laxity and shortcomings of the abbots of generations back, which tradition, and something more to be trusted than tradition, declared to have been matters of scandal, proved no more than that the great Abbey could live through evil times, outride the storms which would wreck weaker vessels, and right itself, though overloaded with abuses which timid pilots would have shrunk from throwing overboard: and now that 400 years had passed since Offa, the Saxon king--(stirred thereto by Karl, the Emperor)--had founded the monastery in St. Alban's honour, and from generation to generation vast building operations had been going on almost without interruption, and the old Abbey still held up its head proudly, its Abbot taking precedence of every other in the land; any man might be excused for thinking that to become a monk of St. Alban's Abbey was to become a personage of no small consideration.