In another house near the church I saw a roof that might have been a roof for a town.  It covered the living part and the stables, and the outhouse and the brewhouse, and the barns, and for all I know the pig-pens and the pigeons’ as well.  It was a benediction of a roof—­a roof traditional, a roof patriarchal, a roof customary, a roof of permanence and unity, a roof that physically sheltered and spiritually sustained, a roof majestic, a roof eternal.  In a word, it was a roof catholic.

And what, thought I, is paid yearly in this town for such a roof as that?  I do not know; but I know of another roof at Goudhurst, in Kent, which would have cost me less than L100 a year, only I could not get it for love or money.

Then is also in Lynn a Custom House not very English, but very beautiful.  The faces carved upon it were so vivid that I could not but believe them to have been carved in the Netherlands, and from this Custom House looks down the pinched, unhappy face of that narrow gentleman whom the great families destroyed—­James II.

There is also in Lynn what I did not know was to be seen out of Sussex—­a Tudor building of chipped flints, and on it the mouldering arms of Elizabeth.

The last Gothic of this Bishop’s borough which the King seized from the Church clings to chance houses in little carven masks and occasional ogives:  there is everywhere a feast for whatever in the mind is curious, searching, and reverent, and over the town, as over all the failing ports of our silting eastern seaboard, hangs the air of a great past time, the influence of the Baltic and the Lowlands.

* * * * *

For these ancient places do not change, they permit themselves to stand apart and to repose and—­by paying that price—­almost alone of all things in England they preserve some historic continuity, and satisfy the memories in one’s blood.

* * * * *

So having come round to the Ouse again, and to the edge of the Fens at Lynn, I went off at random whither next it pleased me to go.

THE GUNS

I had slept perhaps seven hours when a lantern woke me, flashed in my face, and I wondered confusedly why there was straw in my bed; then I remembered that I was not in bed at all, but on manoeuvres.  I looked up and saw a sergeant with a bit of paper in his hand.  He was giving out orders, and the little light he carried sparkled on the gold of his great dark-blue coat.

“You, the Englishman,” he said (for that was what they called me as a nickname), “go with the gunners to-day.  Where is Labbe?”

Labbe (that man by profession a cook, by inclination a marquis, and now by destiny a very good driver of guns) the day before had gone on foot.  To-day he was to ride.  I pointed him out where he still lay sleeping.  The sergeant stirred him about with his foot, and said, “Pacte and Basilique”; and Labbe grunted.  In this simple way every one knew his duty—­Labbe that he had another hour’s sleep and more, and that he was to take my horses:  I, that I must rise and get off to the square.