at the
battle of Poitiers, A.D. 1357. We need not doubt that he halted at
Harbledown to salute the martyr's shoe, and he may have washed in the
water of the well, which was henceforward called by his name. Another
tradition relates that he had water brought to him from this well when
he lay sick, ten years later, in the archbishop's palace at Canterbury.

[Illustration: VIEW ON THE STOUR.]

Another good view may be had from the crest on which stands St. Martin's
Church, which was formerly believed to be the oldest in England, so
ancient that its origin was connected with the mythical King Lucius.
Modern research has decided that it is of later date, but there is no
doubt that on the spot on which it now stands, Bertha, the wife of
Ethelbert--who was ruling when Augustine landed with his monks--had a
little chapel, as Bede relates, "in the east of the city," where she
worshipped, before her husband's conversion, with her chaplain, Luidhard,
a French priest. Dean Stanley has described this view in a fine passage:

"Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and look
on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately below are
the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where Christian learning
and civilization first struck root in the Anglo-Saxon race; and within
which, now, after a lapse of many centuries, a new institution has arisen,
intended to carry far and wide to countries of which Gregory and Augustine
never heard, the blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on--and
there rises high above all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal in
splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church, that Augustine
could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground which derives
its consecration from him. And still more than the grandeur of the outward
building that rose from the little church of Augustine, and the little
palace of Ethelbert, have been the institutions of all kinds, of which
these were the earliest cradle. From the first English Christian
city--from Kent, the first English Christian kingdom--has, by degrees,
arisen the whole constitution of Church and State in England which now
binds together the whole British Empire. And from the Christianity here
established in England has flowed, by direct consequence, first, the
Christianity of Germany--then after a long interval, of North America, and
lastly, we may trust in time, of all India and all Austra