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the rope and squint for a closer view. Then a door is closed and another opened. The procession moves

forward along the corridor, like those other companies who have successively sat in velvet before these fires, dreamed of their advancement and given place to those who followed them.

Facts are but brick and mortar, it is the fancy that paints the decoration. Through half-shut eyes one sees a pageant rising out of shadow-priests with the miter of a bishop, cardinals in scarlet cloak, sailors from around the world, a poet mumbling at his rhyme, a queen who walks to a blare of trumpets. In the turning of a century the procession falls to powdered wigs and silver buckles, and now sinks at last to sober wool. There is a long tread of undistinguished feet, and with open eyes we look upon a band of dusty tourists. We are the ragtag—the children, as it were, who have run from school to follow a gay parade.

We sent off post cards from Knole, with pretense that here we were entertained for a week-end. “The left wing is ours," we wrote, "and each morning we pick strawberries in the garden and eat them with rich cream. His Grace is the soul of hospitality and spares no pains to make us feel at home. H. R. H. is expected down tomorrow, and it will be great fun to unbend with him. Love to aunty!"

George went back to London by the afternoon train despite our protest, for we had hoped he would walk with us to Canterbury. Seldom have I met a man of such a pleasant temper for a holiday, with magic in his fingers if any piano is about. In the chapel at Knole

there stood an ancient organ, now abandoned, and we had urged him to try its keys; but it answered only with a squeak.

Bill, Beezer and I spent the evening at the pictures— Tom Meighan in Alaska. And so through silver streets in a night of moon and stars to our beds at the Royal Oak.

O

CHAPTER XXXIII

WE DRAW NEAR THE END

F this morning's walk, Friday, August the
seventh, I recall a church at Seal in a grave-

yard on a hill where at midnight a ghost might look far across the Weald. And I recollect the Crown Point Inn further on the road, which commemorates Sir Jeffery Amherst who served with Wolfe in America. Crown Point stands above the Hudson and I have passed it many times running into New York. Bill pronounced the beer to be the best of all the trip and with his usual generosity he treated all the room. Its particular brand was called barley wine, and it has the strength (a hint for pilgrims) of the days before the

war.

It was here we were told of a camp above the road

near Ightham where, in its heap of rubbish, an antiquarian named Ben Harrison, famous hereabouts, had dug implements of the stone age. Presently we inquired the location of this camp from a man working in the fields. He was a gardener, once in Harrison's employment, and he had caught his master's zeal for digging in the camp. He led us to his cottage where he had displayed his discoveries on shelves in his sitting room-all manner of stone implements, chipped or smoothed, which had been used by men of the neolithic age.

"And when was that?" asked Bill.

The antiquarian shrugged his shoulders. "Thousands of years ago," he answered. "Too many centuries to count.

As he explained the implements his little daughter ran about the room, and our interest was divided between the present and the past. But he so warmed to our enthusiasm that he gave us each a stone for souvenir. Mine was a kind of rudimentary spoon which I shall find useful for mustard. And these were fashioned when Noah had not yet cut his gopher wood, when men lived in caves scooped from the facing of the hill, beneath which motors now hurry to the coast for the riot of the week-end.

Our friend would take no payment, and here I repeat my thanks for his generous courtesy to three travelers who climbed his wall. The camp, at the top of the path leading from the cottage, was but a shallow pit scratched through the surface soil, as if excavations had been dug for the foundations of a house and then had