teenth century in the
north transept, the fine fifteenth century screen between the north-
choir aisle and the chancel, the foreign sixteenth century woodwork in
the south-choir aisle, the curious wall painting of the Martyrdom of
St Thomas in the south transept, and the old Purbeck altar stone that
now serves as the communion table. Here, before the altar, lies John de
Campeden, appointed Master of St Cross by Bishop William of Wykeham in
1383, his grave marked by a good brass.

Much, too, within the hospital is interesting, and the old men who
eagerly show one all these strange and beautiful things are most human
and delightful. Nevertheless, though the church would anywhere else
claim all our attention for a whole morning, and an afternoon is easily
spent poking about the hospital, it is not of the mere architecture,
beautiful though it be, that one thinks on the way back into
Winchester, across the meads beside the river which has seen and known
both the Middle Age and this sorrowful time of to-day, but of that
wondrous institution where poverty was considered honourable and
destitution not an offence or even perhaps a misfortune, where it was
still remembered that we are all brethren, and that Christ, too, had
not where to lay His head. All of which seems nothing less than marvellous
to-day.

CHAPTER XXI

SELBORNE

I set out from Winchester early one June morning by Jewry Street, as it
were out of the old North Gate to follow, perhaps, the oldest road in
old England towards Alton, intending to reach Selborne more than twenty
miles away eastward on the tumble of hills where the North Downs meet
the South, before night.

I say the road by which I went out of Winchester and followed for so
many miles, through King's Worthy and Martyr Worthy, Itchen Abbas, New
Alresford and Bishops Sutton, is perhaps the oldest in England; in fact
it is the old British trackway from the ports of the Straights and
Canterbury to Winchester and Old Sarum, the western end, indeed, of the
way I had already followed from Canterbury to Boughton Aluph up the
valley of the Great Stour, known to us all as the Pilgrim's Way. For
though it is older than any written history, it was preserved from
neglect and death when the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were making
all new, here as elsewhere, by the pilgrims, who, coming from Western
England, from Brittany and Spain to visit St Thomas' shrine, used it as
their road across Southern