14 NATURE IN ENGLAND. 



they refused to sell it ; had no right to do so, they 

 said; but one of them followed us across the or- 

 chard, and said in a confidential way that he would 

 see that we had some cherries. He filled my com- 

 panion's hat, and accepted our shilling with alacrity. 

 In getting back into the highway, over the wire 

 fence, I got my clothes well tarred before I was 

 aware of it. The fence proved to be well besmeared 

 with a mixture of tar and grease, an ingenious 

 device for marking trespassers. We sat in the shade 

 of a tree and ate our fruit and scraped our clothes, 

 while a troop of bicyclists filed by. About the best 

 glimpses I had of Canterbury cathedral after the 

 first view from Harbledown hill were obtained 

 while lying upon my back on the grass, under the 

 shadow of its walls, and gazing up at the jackdaws 

 flying about the central tower and going out and in 

 weather-worn openings three hundred feet above me. 

 There seemed to be some wild, pinnacled mountain 

 peak or rocky ledge up there toward the sky, where 

 the fowls of the air had made their nests, secure from 

 molestation. The way the birds make themselves at 

 home about these vast architectural piles is very 

 pleasing. Doves, starlings, jackdaws, swallows, spar- 

 rows take to them as to a wood or to a cliff. If 

 there were only something to give a corresponding 

 touch of nature or a throb of life inside ! But their 

 interiors are only impressive sepulchres, tombs within 

 a tomb. Your own footfalls seem like the echo of 

 past ages. These cathedrals belong to the pleisto- 



