Cornish choughs, red-beaked and clawed, on a blue field-have been adopted by the city, and every shop patronised by visitors sells china or trinkets painted or engraved with them. Pictures of the transept where he fell on that day of long ago; yea, even photographs of the skull and bones discovered some years since, and thought to be his, are at every turn. Becket is not forgot, and a certain portly Tudor shade—the wraith of one who ordained all worship and reverence of him to cease and every vestige of his shrine and relics to be destroyed-must surely be furiously and impotently angered. Little need, however, for that kingly shade to be thus perturbed; this modern and local cult of Saint Thomas is only business at Canterbury and very good business, too.

Still goes the tourist-pilgrim along the way to the Cathedral trod by the sinners of medieval times, to purge them of their sins and start afresh. Where

they turned off to the left from the main street, down Mercery Lane, the present-day visitors still turn, and the Christchurch Gate, at the end of the narrow lane, opens as of old into the Cathedral precincts. It is a wonderful gatehouse, this of Christchurch, built by Prior Goldstone nigh upon four hundred years ago, and elaborately carved with Tudor roses, portcullises, and things now so blunted by time that it is difficult to distinguish them. Time has dissolved much of the worthy Prior's noble structure, like so much sugar.

It was here, in this open space in front of the Gate, that the quaint Butter Market stood until quite recently. Tardily eager to honour one of her sons, Canterbury was so ill-advised as to sweep

away the curious Butter Market to make room for the new memorial to Christopher Marlowe, the great dramatist of Shakespearean times, whose birthplace still stands in St. George's Street. It is a cynical freak of time that honour should be done to Marlowe at such a spot, for the Church in his lifetime held him to be "a wretch," a "filthy playmaker," an "atheist and a sottish swine," and it was thought that the unknown person who slew him in his thirtieth year was someone who thus revenged his insults to religion.

It

The Marlowe Memorial deserves attention. is in the form of a nude bronze figure representing the Muse of Poetry, placed on a stone pedestal, and in the act of playing upon a lyre; but it is an exceedingly plump and eminently erotic, rather than intellectual, figure thus made to stand for the Musea Doll Tearsheet, with a coarse, sensual face, most inappropriately shaded by a wreath of poetic bays. The last touch of vulgarity is that especially municipal idea of giving the whole thing a smart finish by surrounding it with four ornate street-lamps.

Burgate Street, branching off from this point to the right, is the street where Barham was born; but our present business is to the Close, and round the south side of the Cathedral to the east end, where the Norman infirmary ruins stand. Turning here to the left, a narrow, stone-paved passage, in between high, ancient walls, leads crookedly through the romantic remains of the domestic buildings of the old monastery to the cloisters and the north side of the Cathedral. It is a twilight place, even now, in the brightest days of summer, and was once, before portions of it were unroofed, much darker. That

was the time when it obtained its existing name of the "Dark Entry." If the pages of the Ingoldsby Legends are opened, and the legend of "Nell Cook" is read, much will be found on the subject

of this gloomy passage. That legend is the "King's Scholar's Story": the terror of a schoolboy of King Henry VIII.'s school, on the north side of the precincts, at the prospect of being sent back by the

haunted entry after dark, on a Friday, when the ghost of Nell Cook was supposed to have its weekly outing.

Well might anyone believing in ghosts and omens especially desire not to meet that spirit, for such an

encounter was supposed to presage the death of the person within the year :

"Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray, Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way;

I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour, It fears me quite-it's Friday night!—and then Nell Cook hath pow'r."

"And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the King's Scholar answers :

"It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift,

And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift;

There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk;
He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark.

"The Canon was a portly man—of Latin and of Greek, And learned lore, he had good store,-yet health was on his cheek.

The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made

of rye,

The beer was weak, yet he was sleek-he had a merry eye.

"For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin, The Canon's house it stood without ;-he kept good cheer

within;

Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look, And Ellen Bean ruled his cuisine. He called her 'Nelly Cook.""

It is not a very proper story that the King's Scholar unfolds; of how a "niece" of the Canon comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy of the good-looking cook, whose affections that

merry eye " of the Canon had captured. Nell Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon