While a torrid August shrivels up the pleasant green earth, the minds of many Englishmen turn hopefully towards Canterbury. I do not mean that the whole Ecclesia Anglicana in The Church Times sense suddenly feels grateful, obedient, or even reverential in relation to hallowed Canterbury. I do not imagine that this Ecclesia Anglicana waits with more assurance in August than at any other time for a voice of authority to speak out of Canterbury. Nor do I refer in such general terms to the devout few Catholics of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, who still go thither yearly, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke,’ making their pilgrimage as did their forefathers in the days of Chaucer, ‘from every shiris ende of Engelonde.’ If the average Englishman were heard to say something like this : ‘Last yean I had to miss my first Canterbury festival since I was ten,’ his hearers would more naturally assume that it was cricket rather than the blissful martyr that drew him to Canterbury with yearly regularity.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning of such an August day, when the morning sun gave promise of taking up the baking qualities of the sweltering night it came on to relieve, that I stood in the market square of Bromley, some ten or twelve miles out of London. We had made up a little party, the Lumboroughs and I, to go dowrn to Canterbury by motor-coach. We had been assured that, in the words of the agent, the party would be ‘very select.’ The Franklins and Dr. Smiths had already booked seats. So at the appointed hour we took possession, noting that our fellow travellers seemed a very ‘decent’ crowd.