His interest by degrees extended from us to the rest of the party. By some peculiar method of reasoning he had concluded that, because we were Americans, all who were following the verger, except himself, must be so likewise. Every now and then he would dart from our side to ask each one in turn, in a gentle whisper, ‘You’re an American, are you not?’ The results were not always satisfactory. I saw one Englishman, with John Bull written in every feature, glare at him in suppressed rage; while a lady, after saying, rather savagely, ‘Well, is there any harm in being one?’ dismissed him abruptly, as if to remind him that not she, but the Cathedral, was the show.
The verger lingered on the broad stairway, ‘which the pilgrims they mounted it on their knees, as is seen by the two deep grooves in the stone steps.’ He stood long by the tomb of Prince Hedward, the Black Prince, and when we came to the stone chair used only when archbishops are consecrated, he deliberately stopped, to suggest that some lady might like to sit in it, ‘though which it won’t make her a harchbishop,’ he added. Then at last he led us to the chapel just beyond, and close to the choir. He waited until we had all followed and formed a semicircle around him, then he pointed to the pavement,—
‘Which now,’ he said, solemnly, ‘you have come to the shrine of the saintly Thomas.’
We had reached our goal. We stood in the holy place for which Monk and Knight, Nun and Wife of Bath, had left husbands and nunnery, castle and monastery, and for which we had braved the jests and jeers of London roughs, and had toiled over the hills and struggled through the sands of Kent. Even the verger seemed to sympathise with our feelings. For a few moments he was silent; presently he continued—
‘’Enery the Heighth, when he was in Canterbury, took the bones, which they was laid beneath, out on the green, and had them burned. With them he took the ’oly shrine, which it and bones is here no longer!’
Shrine and Tabard, Chapels and Inns by the way, all have gone with the pilgrims of yester-year.
FINIS.
London: Printed by Strangeways & Sons, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.
