Below the hospital in the orchard is the old well known as St Thomas’s.  Above it grows an elder, surely a relic of the days of the Pilgrimage.  For the elder was known as the wayfaring tree and was sacred to pilgrims and travellers.  It is not strange then, that it should cool with its shade the spring of St Thomas; it is only strange that the vandal has spared it for us to bless.  But why the elder was sacred to travellers I do not know.

Wayfaring Tree!  What ancient claim
Hast thou to that right pleasant name? 
Was it that some faint pilgrim came
Unhopedly to thee
In the brown desert’s weary way
’Midst thirst and toils consuming sway,
And there, as ’neath thy shade he lay,
Blessed the Wayfaring Tree?

But doggerel never solved anything.  In truth a very different story is told of the elder and on good authority too.  For if we may not trust Sir John Maundeville who tells us that, “Fast by the Pool of Siloe is the elder tree on which Judas hanged himself ... when he sold and betrayed our Lord,” Shakespeare says that, “Judas was hanged on an elder,” and Piers Plowman records: 

 Judas he japed

With Jewish siller
And sithen on an elder tree

  Hanged himsel.

It is from the quietness and neglected beauty of this well of St Thomas that under the evening I turned back into the road and, climbing a little, looked down upon what was once the holiest city of fair England.

Felix locus, felix ecclesia
In qua Thomae vivit memoria: 
Felix terra quae dedit praesulem
Felix ilia quae fovit exsulem.

In that hour of twilight, when even the modern world is hushed and it is possible to believe in God, I looked with a long look towards that glory which had greeted so often and for so many centuries the eager gaze of my ancestors, but I could not see for my eyes like theirs were full of tears.

CHAPTER VI

THE CITY OF ST THOMAS

When a man, alone or in a company, entered Canterbury at last by the long road from London, in the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century, he came into a city as famous as Jerusalem, as lovely as anything even in England, and as certainly alive and in possession of a soul as he was himself.

When a man comes into Canterbury to-day he comes into a dead city.

I say Canterbury is dead, for when the soul has departed from the body, that is death.  Canterbury has lost its soul.

Go into the Cathedral, it is like a tomb, but a tomb that has been rifled, a whited sepulchre so void and cold that even the last trump will make there no stir.  It was once the altar, the shrine, and as it were the mother of England, one of the tremendous places of Europe into which every year flocked thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men.  The altar is thrown down, the shrine is gone and forgotten, in all that vast church the martyred Saint who made it what it was is not so much as remembered even in an inscription or a stone; and the enthusiasm and devotion of centuries have given place to a silence so icy that nothing can break it.  The place is dead.