A Canterbury Pilgrimage

There was a little more stir in the place the next morning, but it was because it was filled with tramps, who were wisely taking advantage of the early coolness and hurrying on their way. But when we turned off the High Street the town was as still in the glare of day as it had been in the late twilight. The high brick walls of the private gardens might have enclosed dwelling-places of the dead rather than of the living, for not a sound came over them. The little pointed houses might have been sepulchres for all the signs of life they gave. The whole town, instead of one little street, should be called Tranquil Place. It seemed very characteristic that the Cathedral should be closed, and this at the season when the tourist is abroad in the land. It was being cleaned, an old man told us. We looked through the iron railing of the door into the nave, and at the marble floor, and the tall, white, rounded arches. 'It's like looking down the throat of Old Time!' Mr. Grewgious thought when he stood there. At the farther end by the chancel steps a charwoman was at work on bended knees. By her side was one small bucket. Here, truly, was a Liliputian set to do the work of Brobdignag. At that rate it is probable visitors were shut out for many months.

After we had looked at the 'Bull,' which still reminds the public by a sign of the good beds enjoyed by Mr. Pickwick and his friends, at the Town Hall where Pip was apprenticed, at the many-gabled, lattice-windowed house in which Rosa Bud bloomed into young ladyhood, and were standing in front of the 'Six Poor Travellers'' lodging-place, reading the inscription over the door, and wondering who were the proctors classed with rogues who could not rest within, a benevolent Englishman passing that way fell upon us. He was a worthy fellow-citizen of Richard Watts. Seeing we were strangers, he, without waiting to be asked, bestowed upon us the charity of information.