The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their Church.

"Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place, "Alleluia!" [Sidenote: Christian England] It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest became yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine.

But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of the first.

"Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English king.

The march of the monks as they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric.