And from the farther side of the walls a wide country of green and gold and the far, thin blue of level horizon or distant mountains. There are no slums and no suburbs and no mills and no railway yards; the green fields and the yellow grain, the orchards and gardens and thickets of trees sweep up to the very walls, slashed by winding white roads. Alongside the river, limpid and unstained, are mills with slow wheels dripping quietly, there where the great bridge with its seven Gothic arches and its guarding towers curves in a long arc from shore to shore. Far away is perhaps a grey monastery with its tall towers, and on the hill a greyer castle looming out of the woods. Along the road blue-clad peasants come and go with swaying flocks of sheep and fowl and cattle. Here are dusty pilgrims with staff and wallet and broad hats, pursy merchants on heavy horses with harness of red velvet and gold embroidery; a squadron of mounted soldiers with lances and banners, and perhaps my Lord Bishop on his white mule, surrounded by his retainers, and on progress to his see city from some episcopal visitation; perhaps even a plumed and visored knight riding on quest or to join a new Crusade to the Holy Land. Colour everywhere, in the fresh country, in the carven houses, in gilded shrines and flapping banners, in the clothes of the people like a covey of vari-coloured tropical birds. No din of noise, no pall of smoke, but fresh air blowing within the city and without, even through the narrow streets, none too clean at best, but cleaner far than they were to be thereafter and for many long centuries to come. Such was any walled town in the fifteenth century, let us say in France or England or Italy, in Flanders or Spain or the Rhineland. Carcassonne, Rothenbourg, San Gimignano, Oxford, ghosts of the past, arouse hauntings of memory today, but they tell us little, for the colour is gone, and the stillness and the clean air. Ghosts they are and not living things; and life, colour, clarity, these were the outward marks of the Walled Towns of the Middle Ages. * * * * *