The heat-glimmer is still quivering on the sand, and over the vast mud-flats, bared by the retreating tide, a soft haze hangs. Yet the sun, sinking slowly through a cloudless sky, reddens as it nears the low horizon, and the grey grass of the old sea wall is brightening in the glow of sunset. Over the long curve of the sand-hills shows a wide sweep of plain, whose level meadows, freshened by the welcome rain, are still a very blaze of gold. Against the sky, where, at the far limit of the bay, the ragged hillocks die away into the shore, stands the white shaft of a lighthouse. Farther still, across the hazy mud-flats, rise the faint shapes of shadowy hills. The tide is out. A sea of boulders, shaggy with dark weed, look like a herd of strange monsters come ashore to bask upon the sand. There is no sign of human presence anywhere, save a house roof just showing here and there above the sand-hills, the distant hamlets scattered at far intervals over the moor, and the black stakes of fishing nets that stand out on the grey mud like webs of giant spiders. There is no figure on the shore, no stranded boat, no idle sail. Nor is there sound, save the low monotonous murmur of the sea. But here and there over the desolate expanse dark shapes of birds are moving. Now and then a troop of dunlins careers along the sand. Surely they are soon back after their brief northern summer. One can hardly think that they and the brown whimbrels whose musical trill at times falls softly on the ear can have been away at all. Now a party of gulls get up with wild stormy crying, and wheel and eddy in the air, now light, now dark on the grey sky of the horizon. All the while to the cliff ledges overhead clamorous daws are drifting, passing to their nests, or settling on storm-worn pinnacles of rock. That shrill pipe was the cry of a kestrel. Two rock doves hurrying homeward, cliff-dwellers like the rest, pay no heed. They know him well, too well to fear at any time his beak or claw. Here he comes, wheeling round the headland. With wings and tail spread wide, he pauses a moment to hover in the air; then sails slowly by. No shrill clamour from the cliff answers his challenge. No fierce young eyases yet are on the watch for his return. He alights on a ledge far overhead, where his mate no doubt is brooding on her rich brown eggs. Over the sea, trembling in the sinking sun, lies a gleam as of frosted silver. Suddenly, far out on the grey level, breaks a line of light. A faint sound falls on the ear—the low roar of the returning sea, the first wave of the rising tide. Now troops of daws, rising from the fields along the shore, fly homeward—a gathering cloud of dusky figures sweeping towards the cliff, that echoes with their musical clamour.

Right overhead they go, clustering like bees on ledges and pinnacles and grassy slopes, and settle down to gossip over the experiences of the day. Again they rise into the air, and wheel over the sea, and again turn homeward, darkening the cliff as with innumerable points of shadow. Once more they rise in eddying crowd. The troop divides. With sharp chorus of farewell one party flies straight over the hill. Their resting-place is farther on. They are not dwellers in the cliff. They are making for the low hills to the northward, a ridge of limestone dwindling into such another rocky headland. There, in the shelter of the hills, stand the ruins of a priory, in the niches of whose crumbling tower, or on the dusty floor of its neglected belfry, their sires and they have built for generations their untidy nests. It is an ancient pile. Founded now nearly seven centuries ago, its grey walls harboured for three hundred years a handful of monks, black-stoled, black-hooded, darker even than these daws. It has long been an article of faith in the countryside that the old tower was

But in the original letter, still to be read in the Cottonian library, in which William de Curtenai, grandson of Traci, made known to the Bishop of the diocese his intention of founding a "monastic house of the order of monks of St. Augustine," there is no hint at all of expiation. Nor, indeed, have we any evidence that the guilt of murder ever did lie heavy on de Traci's soul: though there is an old tradition that, after a brief reappearance at Court, he spent the remainder of his stormy life in seclusion on his manor near Morthoe, where in the old churchyard by the sea

The founder of the priory seems to have had no other object in view than "the welfare of the soul of Robert de Curtenai, my father, … and of my mother and myself; also of my wife, my ancestors and descendants." For rather more than three centuries the "Worspryng" canons, never probably more than ten in number, lived and died in this grey old house by the sea. We know little of their story; but the document is still in existence to which the last of their priors set his name in acknowledgment that the Pope was a usurper, and that King Henry alone was true head of the Church. Two years later all the minor monasteries were forfeited to the Crown—"forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious, carnall and abomynable lyving is dayly used and comitted amonges the lytell Abbeys and Pryories." This was one of the "lytell Pryories." Its revenues from all sources, whether from rents that were reckoned in horseshoes, or from "arable at ivd.," or from "wode and waste at jd. the acre," amounted to rather under a hundred a year.

When the little party of friars turned their backs upon their home, they appear to have carried with them what was probably the most sacred of their relics: one of those small wooden cups which, filled with "Canterbury Water"—that is, with water containing a minute quantity of the martyr's blood—were sold to visitors at Becket's shrine. Marvellous are the tales related by the chroniclers of the time as to the virtue of this wonderful water. By its use sight, hearing, speech, reason, and even life were restored.

The pavement was in fact still sprinkled with his blood when those supernatural manifestations began, which were to make the martyr's shrine the richest in the world. On the very day of the murder, a blind man on his way to seek aid at the church of St. Nicholas, was accosted by "an appearance in the form of a man, who warned him to betake himself to the new martyr of Christ." He groped his way to Becket's body. He touched his own sightless eyes with the sacred blood, and his vision was immediately restored. This was the first of many miracles. The pious chroniclers record how men, women, and children flocked to the shrine from every corner of the Kingdom, some to ask aid, others to return thanks for favours granted: as Chaucer puts it:

Captives, who had been taken by the Saracens, travelled all the way from Damascus, to return thanks at the shrine of Canterbury, because St. Thomas had appeared to them in the visions of the night and helped them to escape.

Five writers of the time did their best to record for the benefit of future ages the miracles of the blessed martyr. These were Benedict, sometime Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, and afterwards Abbot of Peterborough; William of Canterbury, who, perhaps, held office at the shrine after Benedict; Alan, Abbot of Tewkesbury; John of Salisbury, who witnessed the murder, and whom de Traci thought was the man he had wounded; and Grim of Cambridge,—not a monk, in all probability, nor really connected in any way with Becket, but his great admirer. It was Grim, it will be remembered, who was wounded in the vain attempt to save the Archbishop. The minutest particulars are given in these chronicles. The names and professions, the counties, the native towns of many of the pilgrims are recorded.

There are exceptions. In the case of a man who came from "the province of Surrey," Benedict says "the barbarous name of the town has not stuck in my memory." The miracles were of every imaginable description. A sick monk, near Sedan, too ill to leave his cell, was touched with a mere list of the Saint's achievements, and in a short time he was able to resume his duties. A monk of Byland was dying. He had already received the Viaticum, when the Abbot, having made the sign of the Cross in water upon a piece of Becket's hair-shirt, caused the dying man's mouth to be opened, and the water administered. Instantly, we are told, the sick man recovered speech and appetite. It was a common thing to promise a candle to the Saint. There were men who were too ill to go in person to Canterbury, and who dated their recovery from the instant that the candle was lighted for them at the shrine.

There is a description of five widows who tried in vain to restore life to a child who had been three hours under water. They held him up by the feet; they repeated nine Paternosters over him in the name of the blessed St. Thomas, but all with no effect. Then one of them said to the child's mother: "Run and fetch a piece of string and measure the child, and promise to the martyr a candle of the same length." It was done, and the boy at once recovered.

The smallest offerings were not disdained. A Flemish bird-catcher, having tried in vain for some days to trap a certain falcon, cried out, "O Blessed Thomas, glorious martyr, I will give thee a penny if thou wilt give me the falcon." Benedict tells us that "it came instantly to the bird-catcher, as if used to his hand. We both saw the falcon," he goes on, "and received the money."

Even more marvellous still are the legends that passed current as to the wonders wrought by the martyr's blood, which in quantities about the bulk of a hazel nut, and largely diluted, were sold to pilgrims under the name of Canterbury Water. A man, journeying home after visiting the shrine, was belated at Rochester. In vain he sought shelter for the night. At door after door he was refused admittance. At last, "for the sake of the blessed martyr," he was taken in. In the night the town caught fire. When the citizens were fleeing, panic-stricken, "the pilgrim, whose faith was more fervent than the material flame, remaining boldly on the roof, called for a spear, or something long. A fork (hayfork, perhaps) was handed up to him. Then, taking the reliquary (containing Canterbury Water) from his neck … he fastened it to the fork, held it out towards the fire," and thus kept the flames at bay. For "the fire, as if fearing a contrary element, turned aside." Finally the whole town was burnt, with the single exception of its one hospitable house.

A few drops of Canterbury Water swallowed or administered externally sufficed to cure the most desperate diseases, and were quite as efficacious as the pilgrimage itself. By its use the blind, the deaf, the lame, the palsied, were cured, and even the dead brought back to life.

The precious liquid was sold at first in small wooden vessels, fitted with lids, in which mirrors were sometimes fixed, "specula mulierum," as the monkish writer puts it. But as the wood was apt to split, flasks of lead or earthenware were used instead. These were hung from the neck, and came to be regarded, like the palm branch of Jerusalem or the escalop shell of Compostella, as an emblem of the pilgrimage. It was not an uncommon practice, in old days, to place in a martyr's tomb a small vessel filled with his blood. Many such have been discovered in the Catacombs. In the Kircher Museum at Rome there is an agate cup, containing the remains of blood, which was found in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus.

A special point of interest attaches to these legends in that there is reason to think that one of these very reliquaries, one of the earliest and most primitive form and still actually containing traces of blood, has been preserved to the present day. Forty years ago, or rather more—the actual date was 1849—some workmen, while repairing the interior of a little West Country church, at Kewstoke in Somersetshire, had occasion to remove an old carved stone, which had been built into the masonry. It was apparently the head of a column, worked in Caen stone, a material not used elsewhere in the building, and the style was earlier than anything else in the church.

In front of this capital is a niche enclosing a battered effigy, apparently the half length figure of a veiled woman. At the back, where it was embedded in the wall, is an arched cavity, about eight inches high, closed by an oaken panel, and containing a small cylindrical wooden vessel, three inches in diameter, and but slightly more in height, broken and decayed, and containing at the bottom a layer of some dark substance, pronounced, after careful examination, to be the remains of blood. It is a bold guess, but still a guess that has much to support it, that this cup was one of the very reliquaries dispersed through the country after Becket's martyrdom; that it once held no less precious a relic than "Canterbury Water"; in short, that the dark layer at the bottom is what passed, seven centuries ago, for the blood of the blessed St. Thomas himself.

The monastery is now a dwelling-house. The windows of a modern farm look out through the walled-up arches of the priory. Quaint gargoyles peer through the mantling creepers of the ruined cloister. Grey stems of ivy have sapped right through the crumbling masonry. Wallflowers bloom on the worn crowns of the turrets. It is a quiet spot, "here, at the farthest limit of the world." Yet it is not strange that a corner so remote should have been chosen for the site of a monastery dedicated "to God, the blessed Mary, and the blessed Martyr Thomas." All four of Becket's murderers were men of the West Country.

De Brito and Fitzurse were landowners of this district; De Traci and De Morville belonged, at farthest, to the neighbouring county. This crumbling relic is to us but an item on the shelf of a museum. The great churchman himself is to most of us nothing but a name, a mere figure in a page of history. And although poet and player, past and present masters of their art, have done their best to bring him again before the world; although his counterfeit presentment stands to-day before us as full of fire, of valour, of resolute determination as on that fatal Tuesday more than seven centuries ago—yet the Becket of the players is but "a fable, a phantom, a show." When the curtain falls upon that last sad scene, we are conscious of no sinking of heart at the remembrance of an awful figure lying white and still upon the bloodstained pavement. The curtain down, our Becket is alive again. The actor lives, the martyr is forgotten.

There is another figure in the play whose memory lingers in this far-off spot. At the foot of the low blue hills yonder lies the village which was the ancient home of the Cliffords.

Rosamund herself,—the fair girl over whose tomb at Godstow her royal lover wrote—

was born almost within sight of Curtenai's tower. When the fair fugitive pleaded, in excuse for wandering out unguarded, that

she was, it may be, thinking of the hamlet where, in quiet cloisters, long since gone to ruin, she passed her girlish days. There by the

there may have come to her in vision some glimmer of the coming time, some forerunning shadow of the