Now when I had seen all this and reminded myself thus of that great tale which is England, I set out on my way back to Dartford, passing by the footpath through the park to the south-east towards Lullingstone Castle, which, however, is not older in the main than the end of the eighteenth century.

And then from Lullingstone through the shining afternoon I made my way by the western bank of the Darent to Sutton-at-Hone, where there are remains of a Priory of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem; the place is still called St John’s.  The church dedicated to St John Baptist is a not uninteresting Decorated building, the last resting place of that Sir Thomas Smyth of Sutton Place, who was not the least of Elizabethan navigators, director of the East India Company, interested in the Muscovy trade, and treasurer of the Virginia Company (1625).  So I came back to Dartford and on the next day set out once more for Canterbury.

One leaves Dartford, on the Pilgrim’s Road, with a certain regret, to find oneself, at the top of the East Hill, face to face with a problem of the road.  For there on the hill-top the road forks; to the left runs the greater way of the two, into Gravesend; straight on lies a lane which after a couple of miles suddenly turns southward to Betsham, where the direct way is continued by a footpath across Swanscombe Park.  Which of these ways was I to follow?  That question was hard to answer, because the road through Gravesend is full of interest, while the direct way is almost barren all the way to Rochester.  There can be little doubt, too, that many of the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury did pass through Gravesend, to which town doubtless many also travelled from London by water, while others landed there from Essex and East Anglia.  But the lane which is the straight way and its continuation in the footpath across Swanscombe Park is undoubtedly the line of the Roman road and in all probability the route of Chaucer.

Face to face with these considerations, being English, I decided upon a compromise.  I determined to follow the Gravesend road so far as Northfleet, chiefly for the sake of Stone, and there by a road running south-east to come into the Roman highway again, two miles or so east of Swanscombe Park, whence I should have a practically straight road into Rochester.

I say I chose this route chiefly for the sake of seeing Stone.  This little place, some two miles and a half from Dartford, has one of the loveliest churches in all England, to say nothing of a castellated manor house known as Stone Castle.  “It is a common jest,” says Reginald Scot, writing in the time of Elizabeth, “It is a common jest among the watermen of the Thames to show the parish church of Stone to their passengers, calling the same by the name of the ’Lanterne of Kent’; affirming, and that not untruly, that the said church is as light (meaning in weight not in brightness) at midnight as at noonday.”  The church, indeed, dedicated