oof
catholic.

And what, thought I, is paid yearly in this town for such a roof as
that? I do not know; but I know of another roof at Goudhurst, in Kent,
which would have cost me less than L100 a year, only I could not get it
for love or money.

Then is also in Lynn a Custom House not very English, but very
beautiful. The faces carved upon it were so vivid that I could not but
believe them to have been carved in the Netherlands, and from this
Custom House looks down the pinched, unhappy face of that narrow
gentleman whom the great families destroyed--James II.

There is also in Lynn what I did not know was to be seen out of
Sussex--a Tudor building of chipped flints, and on it the mouldering
arms of Elizabeth.

The last Gothic of this Bishop's borough which the King seized from the
Church clings to chance houses in little carven masks and occasional
ogives: there is everywhere a feast for whatever in the mind is curious,
searching, and reverent, and over the town, as over all the failing
ports of our silting eastern seaboard, hangs the air of a great past
time, the influence of the Baltic and the Lowlands.

* * * * *

For these ancient places do not change, they permit themselves to stand
apart and to repose and--by paying that price--almost alone of all
things in England they preserve some historic continuity, and satisfy
the memories in one's blood.

* * * * *

So having come round to the Ouse again, and to the edge of the Fens at
Lynn, I went off at random whither next it pleased me to go.

THE GUNS

I had slept perhaps seven hours when a lantern woke me, flashed in my
face, and I wondered confusedly why there was straw in my bed; then I
remembered that I was not in bed at all, but on manoeuvres. I looked up
and saw a sergeant with a bit of paper in his hand. He was giving out
orders, and the little light he carried sparkled on the gold of his
great dark-blue coat.

"You, the Englishman," he said (for that was what they called me as a
nickname), "go with the gunners to-day. Where is Labbe?"

Labbe (that man by profession a cook, by inclination a marquis, and now
by destiny a very good driver of guns) the day before had gone on foot.
To-day he was to ride. I pointed him out where he still lay sleeping.
The sergeant stirred him about with his foot, and said, "Pacte and
Basilique"; and Labbe grunted. In this simple way every one knew h