On the valley's farther slope stood Westerham with a church tower to mark it against the hill, and this was our objective for the night.

"How far have we gone?" asked Beezer.

"Three miles at most," I answered.

"It's four o'clock," he persisted, "and I am precious hungry."

So we inquired at the Post Office and were directed to a turning and the King's Arms Hotel, which stands in the village square. We fumbled through hallways until we found the landlady in a snuggery where she kept her ledger. Off we threw our rucksacks.

Any cook grows sober at the hint of food between meals, but it was merely a shadow on the good nature of the cook at Westerham, and presently she laid out for us great slabs of beef and bread. We drank her health from pewter mugs of bitter beer and closed hungrily upon the food. Then while Bill and Beezer slept I went out to see the town.

There is a triangular open space in front of the King's Arms that serves as a village square. Roundabout are shops. A farther corner of this opens upon the churchyard but I followed the highroad to the right which presently drops sharply off the upper level past a decayed range of ancient buildings of sagging roof and musty front. The tiles put forth a crop of moss and waving grasses, as if sap ran up the walls thinking it to be a vegetable of a larger sort that was now in blossom.

I recall a nursery tale of a woman whose roof was thus a pasturage of hay, and the calamities that befell her

when she boosted her cow up the ladder for her supper. It is a pitiful story for, when the cow was lodged on top, the old lady was concerned lest the creature fall off. So she tied a string to a hoof and lowered it down the chimney. This string presently she wrapped around her thumb as she sat knitting in her kitchen. As long as there was no jerk she knew that her pet was safe. And the cow did fall off, and she was yanked up the chimney by her thumb where she was smothered in the soot.

I peeped in windows as I went down the hill, into tiny rooms of low ceiling and homely life, where old women already puttered around for supper and sleepy cats yawned on the sill.

At the foot of the incline where the road splits north and south there stands a house more ambitious than its neighbors. It sets back within a garden, and a bronze tablet on the wall against the street announces that this was the home of General James Wolfe from seventeen twenty-seven until thirty-eight. A greengrocer keeps a shop on the opposite corner, where a customer was trying her thumb on the tomatoes. So I stepped across for information. When I put my question all commercial operations were suspended and the shopkeeper told me that Wolfe had been born here. But at this the lady with the thumb corrected her.

It seems that on a certain afternoon of January, seventeen hundred and twenty-seven, Mrs. Wolfe went up the hill to the vicarage for a dish of tea with the Vicar's wife; and, this pleasant ceremony concluded, promptly-evidently without warning-to everyone's

consternation-in the midst of uproar gave birth to a son. I can fancy the hot excitement. The pan of charcoal fetched to warm the sheets! The teacups overturned and spread about with half-bit muffins!

JULIA FLORY.

The village doctor running with his bag!

The Vicar's neglected sermon! The village doctor running with his bag! The spread of news from house to house! Even the echo of this gossip, now that two hundred years have passed, obliterated all thought of tomatoes.

"Shall I put them in your basket?" persisted the saleswoman. “A shilling to the measure!"

66

'What do you get for beans today?" replied her customer, but her tone was lukewarm for she dwelt in older matters.

The house where Wolfe would have been born under better management is open to the public but, although the shopkeeper had lived here all her life and had often brought vegetables to the kitchen door, she had never been inside.

I looked curiously at the vicarage as I came up the hill. It stands snugly inside a garden, dozing forgetful of the past. But I fancy that somewhere on a handy shelf are the identical cups and saucers, still used on a sunny afternoon, that served Mrs. Wolfe and the Vicar's wife.

The stuffy building of the greengrocer, shared with a dealer of antiques, is named Quebec Cottage. And there is a statue of Wolfe on the village green, with this inscription:

With humble grief inscribe one artless stone
And from thy matchless honors date our own.

Six young children were dancing a kind of quadrille beside the statue to the accompaniment of their own singing a merry little tune quite broken by their panting breath. I listened but I could not catch the words. It was a pretty ceremony and it added a touch of beauty to the green. I sat quietly on a bench with back half turned lest I disturb their dance; and, if the soul of Wolfe were lingering hereabouts, he must have enjoyed it as myself that children should keep him

company. I would expect no less from a man who read the Elegy on the eve of battle.

I had often thought that the one thing needed in these peaceful villages of England was the contrasting merriment of children; that these ancient walls were a proper setting for lives that hardly looked beyond their days of April. And here, where our travels had hardly started, we had come on such a village, and the songs of children already were binding close the older centuries with jest and laughter. The world in its essence changes slowly despite the politicians, and doubtless from many of the village windows wrinkled faces looked out upon the fun and remembered how they, too, had played on summer afternoons long past. And the churchyard stands hard by where other dancing grandsires sleep.

I rested in the garden of the King's Arms. There was an easy-chair beside the tennis court and in this I sat to jot down my notes of travel. But my pen was dull with sleepy thought; so I scratched verses, for the search for rhyme and the check of measure on the fingers hold one awake.

In Surrey I sit in a garden of flowers
Where a hedge and the road are near,
And I catch the step from ages past
Of men who traveled here.

Before the days of tool and fire,
In the years of fang and claw,
Man fashioned a path from tree to cave,
For this was his nature's law.