No relic do I say?  I am wrong.  Let all the pilgrims of the past come in at the four gates in their thousands and their thousands; let the great processions form as though this were a year of jubilee, they shall not be disappointed.  Yet it is not to the Cathedral they shall go, but to an ugly little church (alas!), in a back street, where over the last altar upon the Epistle side there is a shrine and in the shrine a relic—­the Soutan of St Thomas.  The place is humble and meek enough to escape the notice of all but the pilgrims who sought and seek Canterbury only for St Thomas.

Musing there in the late spring sunshine, for the church is open and quiet, and within there is always a Guest, I fell asleep; and in my sleep that Guest came to me and I spoke with Him.  It seemed to me that I was walking in early morning—­all in the England of my heart—­across meadows through which flowed a clear translucent stream, and the meadows were a mass of flowers, narcissus, jonquil, violet, for it was spring.  And beyond the meadows was a fair wood all newly dressed, and out of the wood there came towards me a man, and I knew it was the Lord Christ.  And I went on to meet Him.  And when I was come to Him I said:  “I shall never understand what You mean ...  I shall never understand what You mean.  For You say the meek shall inherit the earth....  I shall never understand what You mean.”

And He looked at me and smiled, and stretching forth His hands and looking all about He answered:  “But I spoke of the flowers.”

CHAPTER VII

THE VALLEY OF THE STOUR

CAESAR IN KENT

It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the shoulder of Harbledown, some little way past St Dunstan’s, turned out of the Watling Street, south and west into the old green path or trackway, which, had I followed it to the end, would have brought me right across Kent and Surrey and Hampshire to Winchester the old capital of England.  This trackway, far older than history, would doubtless have perished utterly, as so many of its fellows have done, but for two very different events, the first of which was the Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the eighteenth century.  For this ancient British track leading half across England of my heart, a barbarous thing, older than any written word in England, was used and preserved, when, with the full blossoming of the Middle Age in the thirteenth century, it might have disappeared.  It was preserved by the Pilgrims to St Thomas’s Shrine.  All those men who came out of the West to visit St Thomas, all those who came from Brittany, central and southern France and Spain, gathered at Winchester, the old capital of the Kingdom, and when they set out thence for Canterbury this was the way they followed across the counties; this most ancient way which enters Canterbury hand in hand with the Watling Street by the West Gate.