1FPH rrn ICQ AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON By Anne Rollings-worth Wbarton ITALIAN DAYS AND WAYS. Decorated title and 8 illustrations. IZ mo. Cloth, extra, $1.50 nit. SOCIAL LIFB IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC. Profusely illustrated. 8vo. Buckram, gilt top, uncut edges, $3.00 ntt; half levant, jjib.oo ntt. SALONS, COLONIAL AND REPUBLICAN. Pro- fusely illustrated. 8vo. Buckram, }.oo; three- quarters levant, $6.00. HEIRLOOMS IN MINIATURES. Profusely illus- trated. 8vo. Buck ram, $3. oo; three-quarters levant, $6.00. THROUGH COLONIAL DOORWAYS. Illustrated, izmo. Cloth, $ i .15. COLONIAL DAYS AND DAMES. Illustrated. nmo. Clotb, $1.15. A LAST CENTURY MAID. Illustrated. 8w>. Cloth, Ji. 15- ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON J. B. LIPP1NCOTT COMPANY MCMVI1I COPYRIGHT, 1908 By J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PublUhed November, 1908 Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company The Washington Square Prest Philadelphia. U. S. A. CONTENTS I PAGE WEDDING BELLS AND CANTERBURY BELLS 9 II A MOTOR FLIGHT INTO THE PAST 37 III ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY 61 IV IN WARWICKSHIRE 80 V A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE Ill VI WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED 128 VII ROMAN ENGLAND 149 VIII BIX DAYS IN LONDON 185 IX STORIED WINDOWS RICHLY DIGHT 216 X GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE 240 XI "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" 259 XII DUNDAGEL BY THE CORNISH. SEA 278 XIII A HIGHWAY OF KINGS '. . 295 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A DEVONSHIRE LANE, NEAR LYNTON Frontispiece CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE DEAN'S GARDEN 16 "TRANSEPT OF THE MARTYRDOM," CANTERBURY 26 JANE AUSTEN'S HOUSE, WINCHESTER 52 COURT OF LORD LEYCESTER HOSPITAL 90 JORDANS WITH THE PENN GRAVES 118 INTERIOR OF MEETING HOUSE AT JORDANS 118 RYDAL WATER WITH LOUGHRIGG RISING ABOVE IT 132 WORDSWORTH'S STUDY, DOVE COTTAGE 138 DOORWAY OF TUDOR MANOR HOUSE, YORK 159 FOUNTAIN COURT, LONDON 198 THE ISIS BY IFFLEY MILL 220 DINING HALL OF ORIEL COLLEGE 224 GLASTONBURY ABBEY, INTERIOR OF CHAPEL OF ST. JOSEPH . . . 250 SHELLEY'S COTTAGE, LYNMOUTH 275 THE POST OFFICE AT TINTAGEL 282 EXBTER CATHEDRAL, WEST FRONT 297 2138844 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON i WEDDING BELLS AND CANTERBURY BELLS Mrs. Walter Leonard to Mrs. Allan Ramsay. FLEUR-DE-LYS, CANTERBURY, July 12th. I HAVE missed you, dear Margaret, ever since Walter and I waved our farewells to you from Charing Cross station. This is strictly true, and if you do not believe me I shall conclude that you are so entirely absorbed in your pres- ent happiness that you have never given me more than a passing thought since you and Allan set your faces toward Italy. Does not the wedding at St. George's, Han- over Square, now seem like a dream ? And was it not delightful to have such friendly faces around us as those of the Haldanes and Mrs. Coxe, and Ludovico, and, not the least welcome, that of my brother Archie I It was almost worth being married to bring Archie over here for a holiday. 9 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON All other wedding breakfasts will seem flat, dull, and commonplace in comparison with that unique little feast of ours at the Star and Gar- ter. I fear that neither of us could bear a cross- examination upon the menu, but the pretty room decorated with sweet-peas, the windows looking out upon the green slope of Richmond Hill with the slow-going Thames beneath, are still vivid pictures in my mind. I do, however, remember some huge strawberries on the table, the largest and reddest I have ever seen, and some delicious little cakes called "maids- of-honor," which seemed made expressly for our most charming " maid-of-all-work, " as Archie calls Angela, insisting that she is a " general utility " because she waited on two brides at the same time. It was a sufficiently unconventional breakfast to suit such veritable Bohemians as ourselves, and how misleading our simple travelling dresses were, so different from the gorgeous going-away gowns, with no end of white veils and feather boas, that our English cousins delight in! We were all abso- lutely above suspicion until Archie began to propose healths. Walter says he shall never forget the expression of the waiter 's face when it suddenly dawned upon him that ours was a bridal party. He nearly dropped his platter 10 WEDDING BELLS of soles, the crowning glory of the feast. Archie's contrite face, when he suddenly real- ized what he had done, was quite as entertain- ing to me. But his happy thought of a drive to Twickenham through Bushy Park and a stroll by the Thames and a visit to Pope's old church surely made amends for all indiscre- tions, especially as every one thought that he was the groom and Angela his blushing bride. Do you remember how the waiters scrambled and fell over each other trying to open the car- riage doors for her? Shall you ever forget the delight of cross- ing the ferry in the little boat, and how pleased the boatmen looked when Angela sang * * Twick- enham Ferry" and we all joined in the chorus? That July day, followed by the lovely long twilight on the river, was really too short for all the pleasure that we crowded into it. Now that you have left us, we are all scat- tering in different directions. Mrs. Coxe has decided to go to Carlsbad with the Haldanes, so they are quite sure to be well entertained. My brother enjoys London above every place else, like most men and some women; but he feels it his bounden duty to go to Zurich to pay his respects to some great German M.D., with whom he has been in correspondence, and, 11 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON then, as Memling is his latest fad, he wants to have a day in Bruges en route, to see the won- derful Memlings there, especially the St. Ursula series. I tell him that he should prepare him- self for the St. Ursula legend by going first to Winchester, from whence St. Ursula and her noble virgins started upon their pilgrimage, as he will be sure to see their poor bones when he goes up the Ehine to Cologne. We should love to take this trip with Archie, if he were not so exclusive in his tastes, quite flatly declining to travel with Walter and me. If we only had a little more time, we might possibly overcome Archie's objections to the society of the newly married and insist upon journeying with him, but Walter has certain dates to keep at Cam- bridge and Oxford, and, then, does anyone ever have enough time over here, except, of course, a few unfortunates who don't know how to use it? Archie finally consented to accompany us as far as Canterbury, and is enjoying this won- derful old town as much as we are. He is really an ideal companion for a Canterbury pilgrim- age, as he has always been so fond of the Tales and has his Chaucer at the tip of his tongue. Has it ever occurred to you that what the average man knows he knows more accu- 12 WEDDING BELLS rately and definitely than the average woman? Now pray do not read this part of my letter to Allan ; I certainly do not intend to admit this to my companions; not, of course, that it ap- plies to the men of our families, as they are naturally above the average, but what these two men have unearthed about the antiquities of Canterbury would surprise you. I really think that they are both born archaeologists who have mistaken their callings by going into medicine and the law. We are not strictly speaking in pilgrim sea- son, for if you remember, which I did not until Archie quoted the passage, it was: " When that Aprille with his showeres soothe The drought of March had pierced to the roote," that the motley array of Pilgrims set forth from the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, to visit the shrine of St. Thomas. We, for our part, are very glad to dispense with " Aprille 's show- eres," which, good as they are for vegetation, are somewhat dampening to the spirit of a modern traveller. Whatever this County of Kent may be in spring-time, and I fancy it is a perfect garden, when all these apple- and cherry-trees are in bloom, now in summer, it so absolutely fulfils its ancient reputation as a 13 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON land overflowing with milk and honey that we can well believe, with Sir Walter's Wamba, that " For a yeoman of Kent, with his yearly rent, There ne'er was a widow could say him nay." Our first view of the Cathedral was much the same as that of Chaucer's Pilgrims, the ex- terior being very little changed except that just now the beautiful symmetrical proportions of the building and its chief glory, the great cen- tral tower, Bell Harry, are much disfigured by unsightly scaffolding. Even so, the huge, ex- quisitely proportioned Gothic tower, with its delicate light pinnacles, the smaller tower, the lofty southwest turret, and the marvellously beautiful and dignified Norman porch all con- spire to make this the most impressive of Eng- lish cathedrals. We entered the Cathedral enclosure, as all travellers should, by way of Mercery Lane, which was once, I believe, an outer cemetery for the laity and is now a crooked, picturesque, old street whose houses with projecting upper stories invite constant sociability among their inmates. In the shop- windows, under the eaves, fascinating photographs and souvenirs are dis- played. At the end of Mercery Lane, is the lofty Christ Church gate, Prior Goldstone's 14 WEDDING BELLS gate, which, battered and weather-beaten as it is, has a dignity and beauty of its own. The carvings are much worn away, as in the picture which you know so well, and small wonder, as the gate was built in 1517 and Cromwell's sol- diers had their turn here as in so many cathe- dral towns! Passing under the richly decorated south porch, we entered the nave, which, despite its lofty arches and vast proportions, produces an effect of wonderful lightness and grace. Be- yond the screen, with its delicate lacelike tracery, is the great choir, the longest in Eng- land, Becket's shrine, the goal of pilgrimage, and most of the interesting monuments, which we could not see because there was a service this afternoon. The richly decorated monument of Archbishop Benson is in striking contrast to the severely simple tomb and small kneeling figure in memory of Dean Wotton, one of the earliest of Canterbury's deans. Under a por- trait bust of Dean Farrar's fine intellectual head are these lines of Tennyson's: " The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? " Whether from the depredations of Henry 15 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON VIII or Cromwell's " Blue Dick," none of the fine old painted windows in the nave remain entire, although the west window has been made of fragments of the ancient glass. So we may not look upon the same scenes that so puzzled "the Pardoner and the Miller," when they fell to wondering what the pictures represented, just as you and I have stood and wondered be- fore many an ancient window in Italy. " ' He beareth a ball-staff ', quoth the one, ' and also a rake's end'; 1 Thou f ailest ', quoth the miller, ' thou hast not well thy mind; It is a spear, if thou canst see, with a prick set before, To push adown his enemy, and through the shoulder bore.' " We had a glimpse of the Dean's garden, gay with bud and blossom, in which there is a charming view of the Cathedral building, and then walking around the close and entering by the Prior's gate to the Green Court we had a nearer view of the beautiful Lavatory Tower or Baptistery, one of the loveliest bits of mixed architecture, in which Norman and Perpen- dicular combine to produce a most harmonious effect. We wandered on into the great cloister whose richness of decoration is almost un- equalled, and on through the great ivy-draped 16 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE DEAN'S GARDEN WEDDING BELLS arch to the fragmentary but altogether beau- tiful remains of the Monks' Infirmary. It is not, after all, the grace and dignity of architecture or the richness of decoration that most appeals to us here, satisfying as they both are; it is all the weight of history that rushes over us in this ancient town, which was the gate through which Christianity and the arts entered England. And yet a busy modern life runs along beside these old buildings which are so full of associations, and tidy, thrifty-looking shops are clustered around the famous Pil- grim's Inn, "Ye Chequers of Ye Hope," as if to accentuate the quaintness of this "Dormitory of the Hundred Beds." King's School, founded in the seventh cen- tury, still brings many pupils to Canterbury, and a number of visitors attend the school services held annually in one of the chapels; and in cricket week, our landlady assured us, with commendable civic pride and a keen eye to business, the town is exceedingly gay. But as it is to-day, in its quietness and peace, it best pleases us. We were happy to wander at will through the narrow streets, stopping to gaze at the old houses on High Street with their overhanging eaves, or to linger near the modern monument at the Butter Market end of Mercery 2 17 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Lane, a memorial to Christopher Marlowe, whose birthplace on George Street we found later. Noticing a curious ornament on one of the angles of the Chequers Inn we were told that it was the Black Prince's cognizance, and then we met other reminders of that knightliest and gentlest of mediaeval princes who rode through these Canterbury streets, after the bat- tle of Poitiers, with his royal prisoner, the French King. The two princes, conqueror and captive, were on their way, like the good Catho- lics that they were, to make their offerings at the shrine of St. Thomas. There will be much to see to-morrow; we have only touched the hem of the garment of wonder. Now, to return to the life of to-day, which is still of some importance, we are com- fortably lodged in the Fleur-de-Lys, which, with its quaint courtyard and thirteenth century windows, seems to fit the old-time associations in which we live. The moon is full, and this old town by moon- light is a dream. We wandered off after din- ner to see the beautiful West Gate, which, with its two round embattled towers flanked by an- cient houses, looks like a bit of mediaeval life set down in twentieth century England, then back by the main street past Margaret Boper's 18 WEDDING BELLS house, we strolled on to King's Bridge, from which we had a bit of old Bruges, by whose canals you and Allan are probably wandering by the light of this same moon. These old gabled houses, on a river that is no wider than a canal at Bruges or Ghent, are the head- quarters of the Canterbury weavers, whc ply their trade as did the Huguenot refugees under Queen Elizabeth more than three hundred years ago. They tell us that the weaving of linen and silk quite disappeared from Canterbury for some years, and has only lately been revived. We have found some compatriots at the Fleur-de-Lys, a Philadelphia Quaker lady, Miss Cassandra West, and her pretty niece, Miss Lydia Mott. Miss West is a delightfully orig- inal person and has a vast store of information stowed away in her clever head. At first Walter and Archie, manlike, looked upon the Quaker lady's friendly advances with disfavor as an interruption to our happiness, and rather resented my civility to her, but Archie succumbed to Miss West's charms be- fore the evening was over and I predict that my good man will soon follow in his footsteps, although he still declares himself absolutely loyal to me. The niece does not talk much, which is just as well, as her aunt has so much 19 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON to say that is worth hearing, and then Miss Mott is so sweetly pretty that it is quite enough happiness to sit and look at her charming face. We are all grateful to Miss West for a book that she loaned us which we have sat up half the night reading. In addition to many inter- esting things in it about Canterbury pilgrim- ages in general, there is a most amusing account of two Hampshire farmers, father and son, who made a pilgrimage here from near Winchester. En passant, the Winchester route is one of the famous pilgrimages, which is another reason why we should have gone to Winchester before we came here. I am tempted to copy one little extract from this book which gives an idea of the extreme simplicity, or rather the wretched discomfort, of the living at that time. Only persons of great distinction or wealth seem to have had rooms to themselves at the inns, or anything approaching a bed, and of the table manners to be found among the peo- ple we may form some idea from Chaucer's Madame Eglantine, who was considered a model of deportment and excessive daintiness because : " She let no morsel from her lippes fall, Nor wet her fingers in her sauce deep." People of rank seem to have carried their bed- 20 WEDDING BELLS ding with them en voyage, and our good Farmer William and his son, who travelled "light" as to baggage and indulged in no such luxuries, had sorry experiences while upon their journey through the beautiful valley of the Itchen on their way to Canterbury. "When they were shown to their beds, Alfred wondered why the straw was shaken loose, and eight or nine inches deep, in a frame of boards, instead of being in a cloth case as they had it at home. His father explained that with beds in ticks or cases it was very difficult to keep them free from vermin when used by all sorts of travellers, whereas, when the straw was loose the vermin dropped through to the floor, and next day the straw could be well shaken out and the floor swept. When he examined the straw, however, he expressed fear that they would have a troubled night, unless the bed- ding had been very well shaken and swept beneath, for this was oaten straw. Many travellers thought that oat and barley straws bred fleas, but he believed the real trou- ble was that they had rough stalks, up which the insects could crawl to the sleeper, while wheat straw, the only sort that should be used for beds, was too smooth for insects to cling to. To our travellers' sorrow these fears 21 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON proved only too well founded, and being used to clean sleeping at home, they passed a restless night." From such discomforts by the way and dan- gers from highwaymen, who beset them near Bentley and gave poor Alfred a sorry wound upon his head, the town of Canterbury as they first beheld it from Hobbledown Hill, its great Cathedral shining in sunset light, the spire then surmounted by a great golden angel, must have appeared to these way-worn pilgrims a "city beautiful" and a garden of delight. Nothing could have presented a sharper contrast than the homes and living of the English yeomen of the fifteenth century and the beauty and sump- tuousness of their churches and cathedrals. Eeading the simple tale of William and Alfred, with the glorious beauty of the great Cathedral quite fresh in my mind, gave me some concep- tion of what a pilgrimage meant to such devout rustics as these and what their great cathedrals stood for. The dignity and grace of the vast buildings, the harmony of line and color, the sound of many voices swelling up through the lofty Gothic arches in prayer and praise, must have been an inspiration to many a lowly mind, making more real and substantial the promised joys of Heaven. 22 WEDDING BELLS After reading together and talking over the quaint tale we went off to our slumbers rejoic- ing that we were not, like the farmer and his son, dependent upon the merits of either rye or wheat straw for the comfort of our night's rest. July 13th. This morning we devoted to the Cathedral and were fortunate in having an intelligent and interesting cicerone. He pointed out to us some bits of color still remaining in the vaulting, just enough to suggest the rich, elaborate decoration, on the arches, windows and monuments, that made the interior so gorgeous in Chaucer's time. I must confess that my interest was very much divided between the monuments and memorials of my favorite the Black Prince and the Shrine of St. Thomas, which should by rights claim all of our interest. The tomb of Edward Plantagenet is really in the part of the Cathedral dedicated to Thomas a Becket, having been placed there as the most sacred spot in which this beloved prince could be laid. There he lies, as he had directed, in full armor, his head resting on his helmet, upon his feet spurs like those he won at Cressy, his hands joined as if repeating his well-known prayer, "God de- 23 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON fend the right." On his armor is still to be seen some of the rich gilding with which the figure was once covered from the head to the feet, making it appear like an image of pure gold. High above the tomb, on a beam reaching from capital to capital, are suspended the brazen gauntlets, the helmet with its gilded leopard crest, the velvet cap emblazoned with the arms of France and England, and the empty sheath from which Oliver Cromwell is said to have taken the sword. The long inscription in Norman French was composed by the Prince himself, and calls upon all who pass by to contrast his former wealth, beauty and power with the wasted form that lies beneath. " Tiel come tu es, je autiel f u, tu seras tiel come je su, De la mort ne pensay je mie, tant come j'avoy la vie." Later we saw the Prince's Chantry, in the crypt, which he founded at the time of his mar- riage with his cousin Joan. Here in the groined vaultings are his own and his father's arms, and a face in high relief said to be the Prince's beautiful wife, the "Fair Maid of Kent." The verger conducted us by the cloisters which Thomas a Becket had entered, through a heavy door with a curious octagonal opening on the left, which he told us was a hatch through 24 WEDDING BELLS which the cellarer was wont to pass refresh- ments to the monks. This hatch, constructed with a sudden bend in the passage, "a turn," he called it, was so arranged that the monk served with beer could not be seen by the server. A most ingenious device, Walter considers it, to prevent a too close count of beers. This part of the cloister was used as a boys' school and on the stone floors are still to be seen the marks left by the marbles played by the scholars. Over these same stones Becket passed, with his monks, slowly, reluctantly, not wishing to flee from his enemies, and on to the chapter house, where he desired to re- main. His followers, however, hurried, almost dragged, him into the church, through the door of the lower north transept, which the Arch- bishop forbade the monks to bar after him, say- ing that the church of God should not be turned into a fortress. "The vespers had already begun," said our guide, ' ' and the monks were singing the service in the choir, when two boys rushed up the nave, announcing, more by their terrified gestures than by their words, that the soldiers were bursting into the palace and monastery. In- stantly the service was thrown into the utmost confusion." All of the ecclesiastics who had 25 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON surrounded Becket fled except Robert, canon of Merton ; William Fitzstephen, his chaplain, and Edward Grim, the Saxon monk. They forced him up a few steps toward the choir as a place of greater sacredness and safety; but he shook himself loose from them, bidding them to go to their vespers, and as they hesitated he stepped back to meet his enemies who strode through the door, crying, "Where is Thomas a Becket, traitor to his King and country?" To which Becket replied, "No traitor, but Archbishop." We had all read the story more than twice, but standing here in the transept near the great central pillar in the ancient chapel of St. Bene- dict, on the steps where the heroic monk had perished fighting manfully but refusing to fly, the seven hundred years and more since the foul deed was done faded away like a morning mist, and it seemed as if it was only yesterday that he had stood here defying his enemies one mo- ment, in rude and violent language, the next raising his eyes to heaven with the words: "I am ready to suffer in the name of Him who redeemed me." Was ever such a scene enacted within a church! A fitting sequel was the next act in the drama, the penance of Henry II, four years 26 WEDDING BELLS later. "Here in this Transept of the Martyr- dom, the King knelt and kissed the stones," said the verger, "and afterwards with his head and shoulders within the martyr's- tomb, clothed in a hair shirt and linen cover, he received five strokes of the rod from each bishop and abbot and three from each of the eighty monks, and afterward laid all night on the stone floor, fasting. ' ' Seeing that we were in a mood to listen to tales of wonder our clever cicerone, who evi- dently possessed a fine dramatic instinct, led us to the part of the crypt in which St. Thomas was first buried, where many miracles were per- formed, and then back into the choir to the spot where the shrine stood. This is readily found, as the feet and knees of many pilgrims have worn away the stone floor which once sur- rounded it. Here thousands of the faithful flocked from all over Christendom, until Henry VIII called upon Thomas a Becket to prove his right to sainthood. Becket hav- ing then been dead over three hundred years and not in a position to vindicate his rights, the King straightly charged that "Thomas Becket should no longer be con- sidered a saint, ' ' arid then proceeded to destroy the shrine and reduce to ashes his remains. 27 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Hence the ruthless destruction of so much that was beautiful in this Cathedral ; but in the three hundred years that had intervened Becket's tomb was the favorite shrine of Christian Eng- land. According to Dean Stanley no less than one hundred thousand pilgrims came to Can- terbury in one year, to kneel before the shrine and to rub their wounds and aching bones against it, or the stone floor or any part of the sacred tomb they were allowed to touch, and here: " The holy relics each man with his mouth Kissed, as a goodly monk the names told and taught." The kissing of the gruesome relics seemed to us what our Puritan ancestors would have called "a fearful joy," but our democratic prin- ciples were quite outraged when we learned that even this poor comfort was not allowed to all alike. When the relics were displayed, only persons of rank were permitted to enter the Sacristy and gaze upon certain precious pos- sessions, such as the rude pastoral staff of pear- wood, the rough cloak and bloody handkerchief of the "martyr." "Here," said our guide, "among the many gorgeous offerings that blazed upon the shrine was the Regale of France, a jewel the size of a hen's 28 WEDDING BELLS egg. The King of France had come here to discharge a vow made in battle, and knelt at the shrine with the stone set in a ring on his finger. The Archbishop, who was pres- ent, entreated him to present it to the saint. So costly a gift was too much for the royal pilgrim, especially as it ensured him good luck in all his enterprises. Still as a compensation he offered 100,000 florins for the better adorn- ment of the shrine. The Primate was fully satisfied; but scarcely had the refusal been uttered when the stone leaped from the ring, and fastened itself to the shrine, as if a gold- smith had fixed it there." Miss West, who had been very quiet, as we had all been during the verger's recital, now turned to him a face as serious as his own, and said, "Does n't thee know, my friend, that it is only by means of a miracle that thee can get anything out of some people f ' ' We all laughed, even the solemn verger's countenance relaxed, for a moment, and with a smile still lurking about the corners of his mouth, he told us that in a certain part of the service when the relics were to be displayed, the silver bells of the canopy above the tomb were rung, which was the signal for pilgrims all over the church to fall upon their knees, and this, he said, was the 29 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON origin of the name given to the little blue flower that blooms in such profusion all around Can- terbury. It is a pretty enough tale, whether true or not, and following close upon Miss West's sally broke in upon the solemnity of our morning un- der the spell of St. Thomas. Archie reminded us of the lateness of the hour, and leaving many interesting sights for another day we made our way through the dark entry, and out into the beauty of the " Green Court" and the sunshine and the joy of living, feeling, as Walter said, that a full course of St. Thomas taken at one sitting, or rather standing, was "a bit strenuous." This afternoon we devoted to recreation pure and simple, motoring to Barfrestone Church, where there is some fine Norman work and I truly believe the most beautiful church door in England. Motoring over these perfect roads, many of them old Eoman roads, between hedges, orchards and all manner of greenery is a joy in itself. Our chauffeur tells us that we should not miss seeing the Garden of the Fran- ciscans, and in this most enchanting little en- closure, with its parterres of gaily blooming flowers, we spent a happy hour. The small bridges over the Stour covered with vines are 30 WEDDING BELLS so picturesque, especially one that an English girl was sketching, from which there is a view of the weavers' houses, that I longed to make you a water color of it. Across the narrow river, a creek we should call it in America, and actually spanning it, is a gray stone build- ing which was once the home of the Fran- ciscans. Here it was that Richard Lovelace, a Kentish man, and a devoted adherent to Charles Stuart through good and evil report, wrote the well-known lines: " Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage ; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage." July 14th. We are spending Sunday here; surely we could find no better place than this, among all these memorials of early Christianity. We had an hour at St. Martin's this morning, which does not look its age if it is really the oldest church in England. Where the modern and mediaeval plaster has been stripped from the walls of St. Martin's there are some bits of pink mortar which Archie declares are Roman, and this with a certain kind of tile placed at irregular inter- vals, he assures us, indicates great age. The 31 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON verger told us that the church had been much enlarged, only a small part of it being the old Roman church built before St. Augustine came to Canterbury. As there was a Eoman camp here during the reign of Con- stantine the Great, it is not impossible that some part of St. Martin's was built before Queen Bertha's time, but for me it is quite enough to know that she worshipped here. "Whether or not King Ethelbert was baptized from the beautiful baptismal fount, richly deco- rated with scroll-work and intertwining circles, nobody seems to know. The Norman piscina is old and interesting, and above all, as the sign and seal of antiquity, there is a "lepers' squint" through which lepers and penitents could see and hear the services while standing under the shelter of the old porch. The verger pointed out a narrow little window on the north wall through which, he said, "the evil spirits escaped from the church and went to the north country." Why to the north and not to the south he did not explain. We spent some time in the crypt of the Cathe- dral this afternoon and heard the French ser- vice which has continued without interruption since the Huguenots were driven out of their own country by the revocation of the Edict 32 WEDDING BELLS of Nantes. So sparse a congregation assembled in St. Gabriel's chapel that I am inclined to think that the service is continued because the English particularly dislike to break off from any time-honored usage. Archie says an an- tiquarian, whom we met at the library, told him that the tradition of the French weavers having plied their trade in this crypt is quite without foundation, and Miss West's practical mind had already suggested the impossibility of working in this ''dim religious light." The carvings on the capitals in the crypt are beau- tiful and grotesque beyond my powers of de- scription. One may readily fancy the monks amusing themselves over these carvings, or avenging themselves by representing their enemies with distorted and gruesome faces, a Dantesque revenge, or, like some English "Lippo Lippi," working out in stone wonders the wild joy of youth and love. Walter and Archie had their heads together over their Baedeker's so long this evening, without inviting me to take part in their conver- sation, that I fancied that they were preparing some of the historical conundrums which they delighted to spring upon me, such as, ' ' Did you know, Zelphine, that our word canter was de- rived from the easy ambling pace at which the 3 33 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Canterbury pilgrims rode their palfreys to the shrine of St. Thomas, just as saunter came from sainte terre, one who wanders through the Holy Land?" or, "Did you know that most of the Tom Towers and bells in England were named after Becket?" No, I did not know these interesting facts, nor would they, as I took pains to inform them, had they not been poring over local guides, and had not Archie been talking, by the hour, with a learned antiquarian in the library. A proposition quite different from what I expected awaited me, however, and my brother was the spokesman. "I had been talking a great deal about Winchester and the pilgrim- ages from there. How would I like to go to Winchester in an autocar? It would be a pleasant little wedding jaunt, and I had not had much of a wedding trip, anyhow." How would I like it? How could I help liking it, when he and Walter had planned a trip quite after my own heart, and then fell blow to my vanity ! Archie asked in his most persuasive manner whether I thought we could induce Miss West and her niece to join us. Oh, Archie, is it the wit of Miss Cassandra or the beaux yeux of Miss Mott that tempt you to prolong your days upon English soil? Upon this subject, 34 WEDDING BELLS when questioned in private, Walter, loyal soul that he is! declined to give an opinion. The very first time he has hesitated to answer a question of mine. To make a long story short, the two ladies accepted "my invitation," as Archie is pleased to call it, having the good sense to realize that they would add quite as much to our enjoyment as the trip would to theirs. Can you imagine a more delightful suggestion? I left half of my heart in Winchester when I was there with you, and I have always hoped to return and see some of the things that we missed, and now to go back with Walter and Archie, who have never been there, will be a rare treat. Miss Cassandra is as much excited over the prospect as any girl in her teens. She has a story that she wishes to look up in Winchester, the Dulce Domum tale, which you remember. She and I thought it belonged to the King's School here; but after investigation we find that we must change its habitat to Winchester. Walter has set the fashion of calling our Quaker lady "Miss Cassandra" (among our- selves, of course), as the contrast between her cheerful outlook upon life and her name sug- gestive of dismal prophecy appeals irresistibly to his sense of humor. 36 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON We leave here to-morrow morning early. Walter says that my eyes shine like the King's Regale at the prospect of the jaunt. It is not that I am glad to leave this beautiful Canter- bury, with all its wonders ; but the prospect of a day in the open with congenial companions is something that stirs one's blood, and even old Chaucer says: " What shoulde he studie and make hymselven wood, Upon a book in cloystre always to poure ? " GOD BEGOT HOUSE,, WINCHESTER, July 15th. WE were up with the lark this morning and off before wind and sun had swept the dew from the grass. Our way was by Hobbledown, Chaucer's "little town, Which that ycleped is Bob up and down, Under the Blee in Canterbury way." Before going through what is left of the forest Blee, or Blean, we had our last and most glorious view of the great Cathedral from Hob- bledown Hill, its great tower and airy pinnacles silhouetted against a clear blue sky. Yes, Eng- lish skies can be blue at times, almost as blue as those of Italy and America. We passed by Lanfranc's ancient leper hospital, where was preserved the slipper of St. Thomas which so excited the anger of Dean Colet, when he came here with Erasmus, that he exclaimed angrily, 37 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON "Do these asses expect us to kiss the shoes of every good man who ever lived I ' ' In a field beyond is a little spring with a stone arch above it, and, in proof of its claim to be called the Black Prince's Well, his three feathers adorn the keystone of the arch. The waters of this spring are said to possess cura- tive properties, and, although we were none of us ailing, and indeed felt particularly well and happy, we drank some of the water in memory of the Black Prince, hoping with Miss Cassan- dra that it would not give us any of the mala- dies it claims to cure. This is the last of the waterings of St. Thomas. We saw the fine park of Leeds Castle from the highway and so went speeding on to Maidstone, situated on both banks of the Medway, the ancient capital of Kent, which Samuel Pepys found "as pretty as most towns and people of fashion in it." Whether or not Maidstone is fashionable, it is now a prosperous-looking place, full of brew- eries and nursery gardens. In the old part of the town we saw the Bell Inn on Week Street, and regretted that it was too early for us to lunch there and try the cheer that Pepys found so good. It was Walter and I who regretted; Miss Cassandra had no regrets at not being able to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Pepys, as 38 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST he happens to be one of her pet aversions. " Does n't thee know," she said, in something as near a tone of reproach as her amiability would permit, doesn't thee know, dear, that Samuel Pepys misrepresented William Penn and his family and even called his mother, Lady Penn, a 'well looked, fat, short, old Dutch-woman"?" "She was Dutch," said Walter, "and there was nothing to be ashamed of in that ; and the Pepyses and Penns seem to have had a jolly enough time together, racketing about at even- ing parties with cards, suppers, and dances, and all that sort of thing." "Yes, if thee can believe what he says. Why, he didn't even know how to spell Sir William's name, and although fair to his face and pre- tending great friendship, Pepys was eaten up with jealousy on account of Sir William's favor at Court, calling him in one place 'the falsest rascal there ever was in the world.' I can show thee the passage." "Aunt Cassie is on her favorite subject," said Lydia, who was chatting away gaily with Archie on the front seat. * ' Do not let old Pepys and his gossip spoil this beautiful day for thee, Aunt Cassie." "No, child, thee is quite right," said Miss Cassandra, smothering her indignation and 39 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON turning to Archie to ask him some question about the country through which we were passing. Nothing that we have seen in England sug- gests peace and plenty as does this Kentish land, with its rich meadows embroidered with scarlet poppies over which innumerable sheep and cattle are grazing, its great fields of yellow grain, its orchards of apple, plum and cherry, and above all acres and acres of hop-vines on all sides. These vines, with their exquisite heads of blossom swinging from pole to pole, remind us of the immense hop farms in Otsego County, near Richfield Springs. Like, and yet with a difference, as there is something quite entirely English about this countryside, and the comfortable farm-houses with the pictur- esque red-tiled roofs and machicolated gables, and odd conical- shaped barns, are like noth- ing we have seen elsewhere. After we left Maidstone, our chauffeur begged to be allowed to change his route from the pilgrims' way, as we had planned, for another which he said was shorter and over better roads but still Eoman roads, he assured us. Whether he knows anything about it or not, Walter says that many of the roads are prob- 40 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST ably Roman, as roads once made are not usually given up. To be motoring over Constantine's roads seems sufficiently incongruous, but to be going at a breakneck speed is absolutely inde- corous, and Archie, at my request, in his own language told the chauffeur "to slow up," as we were not running a race, or on schedule time, even if we were Americans ; we were out for pleasure, and it made little difference when we reached Winchester. We certainly have an air of enjoyment. Lydia Mott has about her all the crispness and freshness of the morning. She seems never to get a speck of dust upon her smart blue serge suit, or a strand of her hair out of place, even in the high gale of an automobile, and with no end of little locks curling themselves around her forehead and neck, her face framed in by her blue veil, she is quite a picture of youthful prettiness. I do not wonder that Archie likes to talk to her, and although she is so quiet usually, she seems to have plenty to say to him to-day. Walter and Miss Cassandra and I, on the back seat, have given up all idea of conver- sation and simply enjoy the beauty of the scene and the freshness of the air, which has such a soothing effect upon the lady that she is soon sound asleep. Walter reminds me that this is 41 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON the first time we have motored over the country roads since our famous ride from Como to Varese, when we found Allan awaiting us at Villa D'Este, as if I needed to be reminded of that fateful ride! Absorbed in pleasant memories, and in a sense of bien etre that only comes to us when we are happy and the world is at its best, we flew along through a bit of Sussex and on into Hampshire, until Lydia broke in upon our reveries by pointing out the tower of Winchester Cathedral. It is rather disappointing at a first view, as you may re- member, less stately than Canterbury, and lacking the exquisite grace with which Salis- bury's lofty spire rises into the blue. I need not tell you what Winchester looks like, as it is quite unchanged since you and I were here, except that the statue of King Alfred has been unveiled. It is a fine, noble statue, upon a base of rough hewn stone, but after the Angelos and Donatellos that we have seen one is not easily satisfied. To my thinking Donatello's St. George gives a better idea of Alfred the Great than this statue; something of the force and dignity of the primitive man, which we naturally attribute to Alfred, is in that won- derful face and figure. They tell us that King Alfred was buried 42 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST over on Jewry Street in Hyde Abbey, part of which is now a barn. It seems strange that his ashes were not placed, with the other great ones, in the Cathedral. You remember how in- terested we were in the richly-decorated mor- tuary chests of the Saxon kings, in their niches high up on the side screens of the choir. The remains within must be almost infinitesimal, as the tombs have been broken open during sev- eral wars and the dust and bones considerably scattered and mixed. But this is their shrine, and here the names and memories of Edred and Edmund and Ethelwulf and of some of the Danish kings are preserved, and we feel that the remains of the great Alfred should be in this goodly company. I am more than ever impressed by the beauty of the tombs, monuments, and chantries, some of which are much more noble and dignified than many of those in Westminster Abbey, as Bishop Langdon's chantry, and that of William of Wykeham, placed in the part of the Cathe- dral where he loved to pray when a boy, as the verger told us. * ' How different from other boys ! ' ' exclaimed Walter, which levity so shocked the verger 's reverent soul that we all hastened to make amends by our warmly-expressed admiration 43 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON for the chantry, and for the noble reclining figure with the strange inscription: "Here, overthrown by death lies William, surnamed Wykeham." You surely remember it, and the dear little praying monks, with their innocent old faces and clasped hands, sitting at the feet of the proud churchman whom only death could over- throw. We had an hour in the Cathedral this afternoon, which only gave us time for a gen- eral view of its vastness, the nave the longest in England, and for a glance at the rich decora- tions of the great screen, and the wonderful carvings on the choir stalls, with the impish little faces looking out from the tracery of leaves and flowers, as odd and unexpected as is the Lincoln imp gazing down from his perch in that great Cathedral. The exquisite fan tracery in wood, on some of the vaultings, is said to have been designed by William of Wykeham himself. Walter was as much pleased when he came across the tablet of Izaak Walton as if he had met a friend. We have been laughing at him for getting so much pleasure out of a tomb ; but I must confess that I had much the same feeling when I saw the tablet in memory of dear Jane 44 Austen, and near it that of Mrs. Montagu, * ' the Queen of the Blue Stockings" and, better still, as the tablet records, ''the Chimney Sweepers' Friend." We wandered afterwards through the en- trance to the Deanery, with its three pointed arches, hoping to see Izaak Walton's house, which once stood in the garden. We were told that it had been pulled down, but to make amends for our disappointment we were shown some "absolutely authentic Druidical stones," which interested the men of the party very much, as did a bit of Eoman pavement. It appears that Philip of Spain stopped at this famous old Deanery the night before his mar- riage to Queen Mary. We had just seen the chapel in the Cathedral where her portrait is preserved, and the chair in which she sat during the ceremony. Even in her gorgeous costume, blazing with jewels and her mantle of cloth of gold, Mary could never have been anything but plain and unlovely, and small reason as we have to admire Philip, when we looked at her hard, unsympathetic face we could almost find it in our hearts to excuse him for his cruel indiffer- ence. Mary Tudor certainly had enough sor- row in her young life to turn sweet to bitter! From being the idol of the court and her par- 45 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON ents, their "most precious possession," as Henry was wont to call her when her hand was sought by foreign princes, to be set aside in turn by the daughter of Anne Boleyn, and the son of Jane Seymour, was quite enough indignity to have written hard lines upon the face of Catherine of Aragon's proud daughter. Among many memorials of the Winchester pilgrims we saw the gate made of four pieces of fine grill-work, before which they stood and gazed at the shrine of St. Swithin. This re- minded us that we had not yet been shown the place where St. Ursula and her virgins, and her very submissive lover, set forth upon their pilgrimage to Rome. No person here seems to know anything about St. Ursula, except that she was the daughter of the King of Wessex, of which kingdom Winchester was the capital; but Archie's Canterbury antiquarian gave him an interesting bit of information. He says that the legend of the eleven thousand virgins grew out of a mistake made by an early copyist who freely rendered the entry " Ursula et XI M. V." as " Ursula and 11,000 virgins," reading the M. as millia instead of "martyred." I wonder if a great many incredible tales could not be thus explained! It is really a great comfort to me to have the frightful slaughter of virgins 46 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST diminished ; but, as Archie says, this reading " takes the shine off the Memling paintings of St. Ursula and her train, and throws a great many bones quite out of business." Why are we stopping at this old inn! I hear you ask. We really intended to go to one of the hotels, but our chauffeur brought us here, for some reason best known to himself, and at the first glimpse of the overhanging eaves and tim- ber-work of this most picturesque house, Miss Cassandra began to untie her bonnet-strings with such an air of satisfaction that we felt sure that nothing would make her quite so happy as to stop at this old "God Begot House," which dates back to 1558. Archie re- marked, quite pathetically, after dinner, that "man cannot live upon antiquities alone," but it is only for a day or two as I reminded him. There are many other advantages here to com- pensate for the lack of such comforts as we might find at some up-to-date inn. To be on High Street near the beautiful Market Cross is a pleasure in itself, and then to look out of the window, at any hour of the day or night, and see the full-length figure of good Queen Anne, with the orb in her hand and a crown of gold upon her head, is a privilege not to be lightly esteemed. It is interesting to be in Winchester 47 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON on St. Swithin's Day, in the evening, and espe- cially encouraging to be told that ''not a drop of rain has fallen to-day." We may be reason- ably sure of good weather, for according to the old rhyme " St. Swithin's Day, if thou dost rain For forty days it will remain : St. Swithin's Day, if thou be f aire For forty days 'twill rain nae maire." We find it easy to believe that St. Swithin was kept out of his tomb in the Cathedral by forty days of rain. But what we are inclined to doubt is that it will rain "nae maire" for so long a time, St. Swithin's Day being clear. July 16th. Oh ! my prophetic soul ! In the home of the St. Swithin legend, and with all signs in our favor, we awoke this morning to hear the rain pouring in torrents a rain of the permeating dampness and wetness for which English rains are particularly distinguished. The two men of the party were anxious to go to Stonehenge, stopping over for a couple of hours at Salis- bury, and although we women had all been to both places, and though we were longing for another day in Winchester, we had amiably sig- nified our willingness to accompany them. This 48 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST downpour was too much for even Walter's an- tiquarian enthusiasm, and so we all had a morn- ing together in the "Seinte Marie College of Wynchestre," as it is called in the old charter, which we saw in the muniment room; the date is 1382, but there was a Grammar School here under the care of monks of St. Swithin's Priory long before the Norman Conquest where Ethel- wulf and Alfred were educated. Amid all the wealth of antiquities here I do not wonder that you and I missed some of the interesting things, among others the old paint- ing of the "trusty servant" in the college hall. Such an odd old picture! The servant's hands are full of implements of husbandry and house- wifery. His head is that of an ass, a padlock on his mouth: " The padlock shut no secrets he '11 disclose, Patient the ass his master's wrath to bear, Swiftness in errand the stag's feet declare." Altogether a most delicious conceit, dating back to the fourteenth century, although the figure has been touched up and put into Brunswick uniform as a compliment to George III, who paid a visit to the college in 1778. By dint of much questioning and infinite pa- tience, Miss Cassandra has unearthed the Dulce 4 49 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Domum legend, and, as Archie says, demon- strated her prowess in running a quarry to its lair. The story is that an unhappy scholar of Wykeham, kept in college during the long vaca- tion, wrote some Latin verses with the refrain, " Domum, domum, domum, dulce domum." The boy died just as the holidays were ending, it is said of a broken heart, and the verses were found under his pillow. Is it not a curious coincidence that almost the same arrangement of words was used by the young Wykehamist so many years before John Howard Payne wrote our own "Home, sweet home"? The date of the writing we cannot find, but the verses were probably set to music by John Reading, who was organist to the col- lege between 1680 and 1692. There is no really good translation of the Latin verses, so I will not inflict any of them upon you. The sad little story of the boy's death is doubted by the latest historian of Winchester College; but the fact remains that the Latin verses are still sung each year at the close of the summer term, around a great tree that was pointed out to us. Some other verses, that Walter found, amused us very much. It appears that when 50 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST Grocyn, the noted Greek scholar, was still a callow youth in Winchester College, a girl threw a snowball at him, upon which he wrote, in a strain which is a bit suggestive of Waller : " My Julia smote me with a ball of snow ; I thought that snow was cold; but 'tis not so. The fire you wakened, Julia, in my frame Not snow, nor ice can cool; but answering flame." It was here that the sententious little scholar, when asked by her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, whether he had ever experienced the charms of the "bibling rod," replied in the well-known line, which was sufficiently stately to suit the occasion " Thou bidst me, Queen, renew a speechless grief." Archie has discovered a most hideous regu- lation of the college; the boys actually paid ' ' rod money, ' ' and thus contributed to their own 11 speechless grief," which refinement of cruelty, something akin to buying the rope for your own hanging, was practiced until the beginning of the last century. After a long and profitable morning in the college, which contains a num- ber of portraits, carvings, and tapestries, we returned through College Street, passing by Jane Austen's house, which suggested to us the idea of motoring out to her country home. This 51 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON house in Winchester is the one in which she spent the last months of her life, but the Steven- ton parsonage, in which her girlhood was passed, is over near Basingstoke, about four- teen miles north of Winchester. Miss Cassan- dra was overjoyed at the thought of this little pilgrimage, and begged me to go with her to the Cathedral to take one more look at the brass tablet in memory of Jane Austen, placed there by her nephew, Austen Leigh. The words are so simple and sweet : JANE AUSTEN, KNOWN TO MANY BY HER WRIT- INGS, ENDEARED TO HER FAMILY BY THE VARIED CHARMS OF HER CHARAC- TER, AND ENNOBLED BY CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PIETY. There is a much longer inscription on the ledger stone in the floor nearly opposite the tomb of William of Wykeham ; but we like this one best, and as we stood there reading the words Miss Cassandra recalled to me Mrs. Mai- den's story of the stranger who visited Win- chester Cathedral thirty years ago, to whom the verger said, quite apologetically, "Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there is anything par- ticular about that lady, so many people want 52 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST to see where she is buried!" Such was Jane Austen's fame so near the place of her birth! "My dear," said Miss Cassandra, with a glint of something like tears in her kindly gray eyes, "I want to tell thee that I was named for Jane Austen's mother. Thee must know that al- though my father was a Friend he always en- joyed a good romance. Walter Scott was his delight; but above all others he placed Jane Austen. I have seen him laugh over some of Mr. Bennett's witticisms until the tears rolled down his cheeks, and when he was looking about for a name for me my mother suggested Eliza- beth, as the name of his favorite heroine. ' ' "Why not Jane?" I asked. "Why, thee sees I had a sister Jane; but just at that time there came out a sketch, in one of the magazines, about Jane Austen and her family, in which her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was described as a witty, clever, and charming woman from whom Jane inherited much of her ability, and forthwith my father named me Cas- sandra. Jane also had a sister Cassandra to whom she was devotedly attached." And so you see our cheery Miss Cassandra is not named after the Trojan lady of dismal prophecy. After this revelation, nothing would have induced us to give up the trip to Steven- II AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON ton. Fortunately St. Switkin ceased to frown, and the sun shone forth after luncheon. There is nothing especially picturesque or inspiring about the little village of Steventon or the parsonage, which, it appears, is not the same house in which the novels were written, as that was pulled down some years since. We may believe, however, that the old-fashioned garden is much the same, and the "turf ter- race" exactly answers to the description of the terrace in "Northanger Abbey." Miss Cas- sandra also called our attention to the Hamp- shire hedges, or hedgerows, to which Jane Austen so frequently refers. Quite different from the ordinary English hedge, the Hamp- shire hedge is sometimes a path, and some- times a cartroad bordered with copse wood and timber. The hedges at Steventon were called the "Wood walk" and the "Church walk." The latter led to the church, and to a fine-old manor house of the time of Henry VIII, to whose grounds the little Austens had free access. Seeing this small village, situated among the chalk hills of North Hants, and the hedges, and the rather monotonous and uninteresting coun- try in which Jane Austen lived when she was painting her "little bits of ivory two inches wide," caused us to wonder more than ever at 54 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST the touch of genius that gave interest and vital- ity to everyday and somewhat commonplace characters and events. Although the Austens afterwards lived at Chawton Cottage, on the Winchester highway, it was her early home at Steventon that is most often reflected in Jane Austen's novels. Miss Cassandra says: "It is very much with Jane Austen as with the Brontes ; she was true to the Hampshire that she knew, just as 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' breathe the York- shire moors in every line." If we have never been to Haworth, Miss Cas- sandra says, "go and see the parsonage with the graveyard beside it, and walk across those desolate moors, and then you will understand something of the life and genius of those won- derful women." How I should love to go ! but is there any end to the interesting things we could do in Eng- land? From Winchester we could make a dozen literary pilgrimages, Charlotte Yonge's home is at Otterbourne, and John Keble's at Hursley, both near Winchester ; Massinger, Fielding, and Joseph Addison all lived at Salisbury; and only three miles away is Wilton, of carpet fame, where Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia" and George Herbert his hymns. Charles Kingsley's 55 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Eversley and Miss Milford's Swallowfield are within easy reach. Shall we not come here and spend a whole month some time? SALISBURY, July 17th. This morning we left Winchester betimes, stopping by the way to pay our respects to the St. Cross Hospital, which is on the Itchen only a mile from the town. This very interesting old hospital, founded by Bishop Henry de Blois, in 1136, is for the support of "thirteen poor, feeble old men," and after the lapse of nearly eight hundred years it still carries on the work for which it was established. We met some of the aged brothers coming out of the chapel, in black gowns with silver crosses on the left breast. A very intelligent brother took us through the chapel and explained to us the curi- ous griffs on the bases of the columns, carvings of various animals, and the beautiful Nor- man work over the doors and windows, and the "lepers' squint." The quadrangle through which we passed to the refectory is most pict- uresque and is surrounded by the dormitories, with their many slender chimneys and lovely arched doorways. In the refectory, which is open to the sky, our guide showed us the great leather jacks, or pitchers, which were used to 56 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST bring up ale from the cellar, as each poor feeble brother was allowed three quarts per day. An interesting rule of St. Cross is that no person asking for a piece of bread and a horn of ale shall be turned away from the gate. We did not demand this far-famed dole at the por- ter's lodge, but we had the pleasure of seeing some poor men enjoy it, three of them at one time. The woman at the gate said it was given out as long as the daily portion lasted. There is a regular fee charged for admission to St. Cross, but so small a one a shilling and six pence for a party that we naturally wished to give the good brother who conducted us a small douceur. Archie and Walter, I knew, were having a bad quarter of an hour over this ques- tion of to tip or not to tip the refined and edu- cated man who had given us so much pleasure. Miss Cassandra, like the proverbial ''Lady from Philadelphia," came to their rescue by telling them that the good brothers were quite used to accepting tips, and by putting all of our offerings together we could make up a sum which they need not hesitate to offer our guide. As usual, Miss Cassandra was right, and the old gentleman was more than willing. We accomplished our motor trip to Stone- henge this morning, which I need not tell you 67 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON looked quite the same as when we saw it. The only thing that seems to be changed is the opin- ion of the antiquarians about the origin of the mysterious monuments. It was all quite easy and simple when we studied history and Mrs. Markham told us that these were Druidical al- tars, but now the Phcenicians, the Saxons, the Danes, and even the Buddhists are allowed an opportunity to claim the honor of setting up Stonehenge. Archie's antiquarian told him that there are a number of these stone circles in the Orkneys, on the Island of Lewis, and in other parts of the kingdom. So much excavat- ing is being done through England that their history will some time be revealed. We stopped at Old Sarum, on our way, an enormous camp once the site of a Roman encampment. It is not possible to go any dis- tance here without being reminded of the Eoman occupation. At Amesbury, where we stopped for luncheon, Vespasian had a camp, and what interested me more, Gay wrote his ''Beggar's Opera" at Amesbury Abbey, a quite proper place for playwriting, as Ames- bury, like the town of the Prince of Dramatists, is situated upon the Avon. And as if to hope- lessly confuse one's geography, there is a vil- lage of Stratford quite near. 58 A FLIGHT INTO THE PAST We reached Salisbury in time to walk around the Cathedral and the close. The best view we had of it was from Sarum hill, and as it rises from the surrounding level with a certain dig- nity, lightness and grace, Salisbury Cathedral may well be called The Lady of the Plain. The interests of the day have been rather too varied to suit my taste; but this was our one day for Stonehenge, as we all go our separate ways to-morrow. Archie in- sists upon taking us to Reading, which is a good starting-place for Miss Cas- sandra and Miss Lydia, who are to visit friends in Cambridge; and for ourselves, as we are going northward. I really do not know just where we are going, as Walter is so mysterious about our next stopping-place; I rather think I am to have another "wedding journey," and if it proves as delightful as this one of Archie's and Walter's planning, I shall feel that to keep quiet and drift is a desirable role for me. Whatever my good man's plans are, Miss Cas- sandra is evidently au courant of them, as they have mysterious confabs and much nodding and smiling on the part of the Quaker lady. I choose to see nothing, as I dearly love to be surprised. Something else that is not exactly a surprise, as it was my own suggestion, is that 59 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Christine and Lisa are coming over next month, and this is also for my pleasure, although I must admit that their father's eyes dance when- ever their names are mentioned. If Mrs. Coxe could only know how pleased I am at the prospect of having the little girls with me, she would stop pitying me for having married a widower with children. Of course the dear lady was quite too polite to express her sympathy in words; but a chacun a son gout look came over her face whenever the children's names were mentioned. Poor dears, I do trust that they may like me ! Ill ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY KEIGHLET, July 19th. You will wonder, dear Margaret, when you read this letter-heading, where we are and why we are here. I wondered myself, because, as I told you, Walter would give me no satisfac- tion, having planned this little detour as a sur- prise to me. Only when looking over some post-cards at a stationer's yesterday afternoon and finding a lot of Haworth pictures the Bronte house, the Black Bull, and the Church did it suddenly dawn upon me that Keithley, as these remarkable Britons call it, is the Keighley which Mrs. Gaskell speaks of as an old-fash- ioned village on the road to Haworth. Walter's delight over my surprise and his success in II doing me," to be quite English, would have amused you and Allan. This manufacturing town, grimy with the smoke of many worsted mills, is a prosaic enough entrance to the home of the writers of the most romantic and imaginative fiction of 61 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON their day. Dull and gray as it looks, after the rich verdure and bloom of Kent and Hamp- shire, I shall always hold Keighley in grateful remembrance as the gate to a day of perfect happiness in Haworth. This is my real wed- ding journey, because it was all planned as a surprise for me, and is a pilgrimage so entirely after my own heart. The Commercial Hotel, which we were told was the least objectionable in the town, is fur- nished with a grill-room where we dined upon chops of England's best, potatoes browned to a turn, and the inevitable plum tart. After din- ner, being interested in refreshing our mem- ories by looking over a copy of Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte,'* which we picked up in a bookshop, we read until a late hour. The room assigned to us was of magnificent proportions and brilliantly lighted with elec- tricity. The landlady in showing it to me said that it was the manager's room, which I fancy she gave to us as a tribute to my gray hair and generally sedate appearance. When I turned off the light about midnight I noticed that a number of wires crossed the room near the ceiling, but being very sleepy I paid no attention to them and was soon in the midst of an animated conversation between ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY Rochester and Charlotte Bronte. The demure little lady was telling her hero, who had long black hair and wore a Lord Byron collar, that he really must leave her then and there, when suddenly upon the stillness of the night there sounded, not the wild shriek of the insane wife of Eochester which would have been entirely appropriate to the occasion and the hour, but a loud, persistent knocking at the door, and a voice calling out something about an old gen- tleman who had no light and could not find his way to his bed. As this circumstance did not seem especially to concern us, we paid no at- tention to it until the voice again called out that we had turned off "the central switch," and the whole house was as black as ink. The old gentleman's dilemma was of so Pick- wickian a flavor, and the whole affair was so amusing, especially Walter's wrath over what was quite our own fault, that we forgot our annoyance in the humor of the situation and began the day for it must then have been after one o'clock with a hearty laugh. The next day, the one day we had dedicated to Haworth, it was raining. We are inclined to think that it always rains in Yorkshire, the skies are so leaden. By eleven o'clock, the hour for one of the infrequent trains leaving for 63 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Haworth, the rain had ceased, but the clouds were still heavy and lowering. When, however, we saw the sombre little town quite two miles before we reached the station, upon its hilltop with dun and purple hills rising above it, just as Mrs. Gaskell described it, we concluded that clouds and gray skies best became Haworth. Its associations are certainly not of the gayest, when we remember the semi-tragic life of the three remarkable women who lived here, and their daily and hourly struggle with poverty and ill-health, while across their path was ever the shadow of the ill-doing of the brilliant, be- loved, but weak and ill-governed Branwell Bronte. We were travelling third-class to-day, for lo- cal color, and you will, I think, admit that we found it. A portly and red-faced man, still in that debatable land which we are pleased to call middle life, was talking quite earnestly to a companion in a language that we supposed to be Yorkshire, which we managed to understand, even though I am not clever enough to put it on paper. We gathered from the stranger's remarks, interlarded as they were with some quite unfamiliar expletives, that he had not been pleased with his accommodations at the Commercial Hotel at Keighley. Then in quite 64 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY plain English he exclaimed, "When I came to the inn at one o'clock, it was all dark, and so, stumbling and batting about, I opened what I thought to be my door. A scream followed, 'Bobbers! Fire!' Fortunately I recognized the voice of the manageress, and, quieting her alarm by telling her I had made a mistake, and that the house was as black as a coal-mine, she set about finding out what was the matter." We were deeply interested by this time, and considerably disconcerted. The speaker's Eng- lish was evidently a concession to our ig- norance, as he was pleased to include us in the conversation. "And what was it fuse burned out? " asked the comrade. "No, some fule of a woman had turned off the central switch. An American I fancy they don't know much about electricity in that country. ' ' "Where, oh, where did Franklin fly his kite?" murmured Walter. "The manageress had gone to bed, I fancy, but where was the night watchman?" queried the listener. "Sound asleep in the office. But did you ever hear of such a fule trick?" Smothering our laughter, we acknowledged 5 65 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON that we never had, and, to divert attention from my burning cheeks and confusion of counte- nance, Walter began to look over his time tables and to ask questions about trains to York. Among other papers and notes there fell upon the floor an introduction to the proprietor of the Black Bull in Haworth, which had been pressed upon us by our landlord at Canterbury. Our friend of the midnight adventure picked up the note, and, as he returned it, said quite civilly, "I see my name on the envelope. What can I do for you?" Walter explained, and he and the host of the Black Bull were soon talking together, the lat- ter informing his ignorance as to localities and distances, while I, the guilty one, the disturber of the night's peace, thought of the Bronte sis- ters, who so often walked these four miles be- tween Keighley and Haworth, as there was no railroad in their time, and a hack from the Devonshire Arms was too great a luxury to be indulged in often. As there were no hacks at the station to-day, we climbed up the hillside road, which is so steep that the stones are zigzagged to keep men and horses from slipping. Although a thriving little manufacturing town has grown up at the foot of the long hill, 66 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY we can well imagine the loneliness of Haworth in the winter, even now, and in Charlotte Bronte's time the mail coach over Blackston Edge was sometimes snowed up for a week or ten days. At the top of the hill is the principal street of the village, paved with great blocks of stone, like the hill towns of Italy and almost as primi- tive in its appearance. On this street stands the Black Bull, Branwell Bronte's favorite resort. Our guide insisted upon our stopping first to see his inn, which is the quaintest and most individual that we have found anywhere, with its black oak and shining pewter, very much, I fancy, as it looked in the days of the Brontes. The daughter of mine host of the Black Bull, a pretty, rosy-cheeked lassie, at her father's sug- gestion, constituted herself our cicerone. A more intelligent guide we might have found, but none more willing or cheerful. Whether showing us the tablet to Charlotte Bronte in Haworth Church, or pointing to us the windows of her room at the rectory, the little maid's countenance was wreathed in smiles, probably in view of prospective shillings. Her one idea seemed to be to take us to the Bronte Museum, but we preferred to linger near the rectory, 67 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON which is somewhat enlarged since the Brontes lived here and now has, in front of it, a tidy little garden and lawn. Some flowers and shrubs have been induced to grow here where once a few straggling currant bushes struggled for ex- istence on the bare strip of ground between the house and the churchyard wall. On the other three sides the house is set about with grave- stones. Across the way is the school-house, the church quite near toward the village, and be- yond the street opens out upon the lonely moors that Emily Bronte so loved that she pined and grew pale and ill when away from them. It was the sense of liberty that the moors gave her that Emily delighted in, and here were the elemental forces that she longed to meet in nature and in men and women. There must have been something of the primi- tive woman in these sisters, especially in Emily, whose free and untamed soul, as Matthew Arnold wrote, " Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died." Coming of a mingled strain of Cornish and Irish ancestry, both poetic and imaginative strains, the inherited tendencies of the Brontes 68 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY were developed by the loneliness of a home where there were few visitors and no childish friendships. The sensitive and imaginative girls wrote their weird and romantic dramas and acted them for the pleasure of their own circle, which included their father and their brother Branwell. Do you remember how Emily and Anne amused themselves, for years, with "the Gon- dals"? Emily wrote in one of her letters: "The Gondals still flourish, bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First War." These creatures of their imagination, whom they carried through the most thrilling experi- ences, seem to have afforded the sisters unfail- ing entertainment. Emily frequently refers to the struggles between the royalists and the re- publicans in "Gondaland," and once she says, "We intend sticking firmly by the rascals as long as they delight us, which I am glad to say they do at present." "Pleasures of the Imag- ination" the sisters certainly possessed; and how much imagination was needed to make life interesting upon their bleak hilltop, which Charlotte herself admitted was "not romantic," even if "flowers brighter than the rose bloomed for Emily in the blackest of the heath" ! Although we had been told that the present 69 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON rector of Haworth admitted no visitors, having doubtless been bored to extinction by curious tourists, I plucked up courage to sound the knocker, hoping, quite unreasonably, that some exception might be made in our favor, only to be met with an uncompromising rebuff admin- istered in the expressionless tone of an official guide: "No visitors admitted without a letter of introduction." And so, having no letter, we were denied the pleasure of seeing the interior of the Bronte home, and above all the dining- room, that is so intimately associated with the life and work of Charlotte and Emily. Here it was, says Mrs. Gaskell, after their simple sup- per and their allotted task of needlework, in which the sisters all excelled, that they would walk around and around the table, their arms intertwined, discussing plans for school-keep- ing, teaching, and in later years the plots for their novels. The demure little elder sister combined with her soul of fire and her rich imaginative faculty a saving sense of humor, and so much sweetness and domestic charm that she more than once made havoc with the hearts of her father's curates. The appearance and disappearance of her several suitors served to vary the monotony of Charlotte's life, but Emily and Anne were too painfully shy and re- 70 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY served to indulge to any extent in recreations of the same sort, although. Emily in childhood is said to have been the prettiest of the three, and we have Charlotte 's authority for the state- ment that the curates sometimes "cast sheep's eyes at Anne." Dear, gentle Anne Bronte, as her brother-in- law called her, seems to us a vague and shadowy personality. She was perhaps understood by no one except her bosom companion and confi- dante, Emily. Her life was passed at Haworth, to which place she was brought as a baby, only leaving home to fulfil the uncongenial task of a governess at neighboring country houses. It seems that only once did Anne go from home on a pleasure trip, unless her hurried journey to London, with Charlotte in 1848, may be so considered. The record of this brief out- ing is in Emily's diary of 1845 : Anne and I went on our first long journey by ourselves together, leaving home the thirtieth of June, Monday, sleep- ing at York, returning to Keighley Tuesday evening, sleep- ing there and walking home on Wednesday morning. This same "long journey" to York we had planned to make from Keighley this afternoon, had not Bronte associations absorbed us body and soul to the exclusion of everything else. Instead of the two or three hours that we were 71 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON assured would be quite long enough for Ha- worth, we have given up the entire day to it, only returning to Keighley in time for a late dinner. As we strolled across the moors back of the parsonage we recalled the description given by Mrs Bronte's nurse of the six little creatures, the eldest but seven, who used to walk out hand in hand over these moorland paths. "I used to think them spiritless," said the nurse, "they were so different to any children I had ever seen. In part I set it down to a fancy Mr. Bronte had of not letting them have flesh meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving," she explained, "for there was plenty and even waste in the house, but he thought children should be brought up simply and hardily. ' ' ' ' There is nothing pale or delicate about that pair," said Walter, with the most delightful inconsequence, but I knew that our talk about the motherless little Brontes had turned his thoughts toward his own bairns, and so I was prepared to fill in any gaps that might occur. "And if we should undertake to cut off their flesh-meat there certainly would be a rebellion in the family." "And they would be quite right," I said. "I 'm glad for my part that Christine and Lisa 72 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY know what they want and are not afraid to ask for it. The Bronte children were far too meek and submissive for their own good." "You evidently share my friend Abbott's views about the training of parents, Zelphine," exclaimed Walter ; * ' if old Mr. Bronte had been trained out of his queer notions and had not sent Charlotte and Emily back to that wretched school where they were starved, they might have lived to be old and Emily might have writ- ten another 'Wuthering Heights.' " This last with a twinkle in his eye, as if one "Wuthering Heights" was not quite enough for the world! Yet Mr. Swinburne considers this book as one of the legacies of genius, and I must say that I quite agree with his estimate of the wonder- ful power of Emily Bronte's description of the moors, when he says, "All the heart of the league-long billows of rolling and breathing and brightening heather is blown with the breath of it in our faces as we read ; all the fragrance and freedom and glow and glory of the high north moorland." To make the picture complete, I longed to see a lapwing, with its brilliant iridescent plumage, recalling Emily's exquisite descrip- tion of the flight of the one which Catherine Linton followed. 73 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON The Haworth moors are less lonely, now that so many stone quarries have been opened here, than in the days when the sisters walked toward the purple black hills and the little waterfall that they loved. But even so, there is some- thing inexpressibly weird and desolate about these long sweeps of gently rolling common edged by a line of sinuous hills which stretch off into more distant reaches of upland, giving one a sense of boundless space. To-day a leaden sky hung low, as if to shut in this barren treeless expanse from the outside world. Surely here were all the elements for tragedy, and as we thought of the parsonage with its surrounding gravestones, looking out upon this lonely up- land, we did not wonder that the sensitive, im- pressionable Charlotte should have written "Jane Eyre" and "Shirley," or that Emily 's wild, untrammelled imagination should have burned itself out in the almost inconceivable pages of "Wuthering Heights"! After an indifferent luncheon at the Black Bull, we spent a delightful hour in the Bronte Museum, which is Haworth 's memorial to its gifted daughter. Here are a number of letters and personal effects of Charlotte's, and a silk gown with a bayadere stripe of plum color and brown, which rather dismal garment is 74 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY marked "Charlotte Bronte's wedding dress." But we had it on Mrs. Gaskell's authority that the bride wore a white embroidered muslin and a white bonnet trimmed with green leaves, in which she looked "like a snowdrop," and so we were only willing to accept the plum-colored silk as a going away gown, although ready to believe, as the card further stated, that "Those who saw the wedding said she tripped along like a little fairy." The fairy boots in which the bride tripped along, we saw later in the house of a daughter of one of Mr. Bronte's parishioners. Such tiny boots they were, what used to be called gaiters, laced up the sides and made of a piece of the plum-colored silk. The fairy gaiters and a pair of stays, long and cruelly stiff as to bones, and about large enough in the waist for a robust doll, gave us a realizing sense of the fragile figure and small stature of the modest little authoress who went up to the great city of Lon- don to visit her publishers, so simple and country-like with all her genius ! For some reason, the plum-colored gown and the tiny boots brought tears to my eyes, even more than the tablet in Haworth Church, per- haps because they made more real the brief period of love and wedded happiness that cast 75 a sunset radiance over the shadowed life of Charlotte Bronte. In thinking of her now I find myself rejoicing over the few simple pleasures that came to the self-sacrificing daughter and devoted sister; her visit to her husband's fam- ily in Ireland, her liking for these new relations, and, above all, the joy that came to her from being cherished and cared for, she whose chief thought had always been for others. Even on the night before her wedding poor Charlotte had a serious disappointment. When all was finished, her trunk packed and the wed- ding dress ready to put on, Mr. Bronte an- nounced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to the church. As there was no one else to give away the bride Miss Wooller, her old teacher, offered her services and so the wedding was not delayed. Can you imagine a father being so disagreeable when he had finally, and after many months of uncertainty, given his consent to the marriage? Our last visit was to Haworth Church, which is quite changed and is now a large modern building, with nothing left of the old church except the tower. The tablet to the Bronte sisters is on the wall at the west end of the church, and quite near the chancel Charlotte was buried. Upon the tablet is the simple in- 76 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY scription, "Charlotte, wife of the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, A.B." The verger told us that the brass tablet in memory of Charlotte and Emily was given by a London gentleman when the church was rebuilt. A wreath of flowers, now faded and brown, had been placed over Charlotte's grave to which a card is attached upon which is written, "With the homage of B. C. and V. A. Wilberforce [Basil and Vir- ginia Wilberforce], September 19th, 1899." This is the Canon Wilberforce whose preach- ing interested us so much at St. John's, Westminster. On our way back to Keighley we met the rector of a neighboring parish and had a pleasant talk with him. He regretted our dis- appointment in not being able to get into the parsonage and gave us his card which, he said, "would admit us upon our next visit to Haworth." Our next visit! Does one ever come again to these little out-of-the-way spots, dear as they are with all their interesting asso- ciations? This reverend gentleman, Mr. Law- rence by name, was quite willing to talk about the Brontes, as are all the people hereabouts, they having brought renown and many visitors to this obscure little Yorkshire village. He said, that he had always thought Emily the 77 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON most remarkable and entirely individual of the sisters. "Shrinking from strangers, except when forced to go among them to earn her share of the family expenses, she always re- turned to the wild solitude of the moors with delight. It was quite evident," he said, "from some of the scenes and characters described in 'Wuthering Heights,' that Emily's imagination had been impressed by tales and traditions that had reached her ears of the rude and primitive life of Yorkshire during the early years of the century, when cock-fighting was a favorite pastime in the West Eiding and the cruel sport of bull-baiting was still practiced." Mr. Law- rence said that Mrs. Gaskell's story of the York- shire squire who was so addicted to cock-fight- ing that while he was ill with a mortal disease he had mirrors so arranged that he could see the game from his bed was not exaggerated. Another tale that he told us of a certain squire who was in the habit of securing privacy in his house by firing indiscriminately at any one who threatened to disturb his peace, reminded us of Mrs. Gaskell's description of the remarkable manner in which Mr. Bronte was wont to work off his superfluous emotions. The firing of a succession of pistol shots by her husband seems to have been so common an occurrence that deli- 78 ZELPHINE'S WEDDING JOURNEY cate Mrs. Bronte, lying on her bed upstairs, hearing the quick explosions below and knowing that something was wrong, would say to her nurse, with the sweet submissiveness in which English women seem to excel, ' ' Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?" When we think of the examples of ungov- erned human nature that Emily Bronte en- countered in her own family, her eccentric father and her passionate, unhappy brother, and hearing Mr. Lawrence's tale of the rude- ness of the Yorkshire life sixty years ago, her Heathcliff and Earnshaws do not seem as im- possible as when we read about them by our peaceful firesides at home. We shall never re- gret this day with the Brontes, and are glad that we have seen their moors, which, lonely as they seem to us, possessed for the sisters a divine beauty. IV IN WARWICKSHIRE WARWICK, July 21st. SINCE writing to you, dear Margaret, we have changed all of our plans, which you and I once decided was the most congenial occupa- tion for a traveller, and we are indulging in what the English call "bad geography." In- stead of going directly from Keighley to York, we suddenly decided to turn our faces south- ward, while the weather is so cool, returning to the North country in August. Here we are established in a fairly comfort- able place near the castle of the old King- maker, after spending a night in a quite impossible inn that was recommended to us as perfectly delightful. At the first place that we essayed, also highly recommended and a tem- perance hotel at that, the manager was so under the influence of one or more of his tabooed bev- erages that it was all that he could do to keep his balance while he talked to us. As this is our second experience of the sort, we have 80 IN WARWICKSHIRE added an emphatic note to our list of don'ts: Don't ever try a temperance hotel under any consideration whatever. "He is as happy as a lord," exclaimed Wal- ter, as we turned away. I wonder why it is that the best of men, even such as Walter, will persist in speaking lightly and jocosely of what is so absolutely degrading and beastly. When I ventured a remonstrance, rather tentatively, knowing well the aversion of the male mind to anything of the nature of a temperance crusade, Walter looked quite serious for a moment, and then laughingly replied that this form of ex- pression was probably a survival in our speech of the time when a man's feats in drinking were lauded with his prowess in arms. Later Walter illustrated his theory by point- ing out the huge caldron in Warwick Castle called Guy's Porridge Pot, saying, "You see, Zelphine, whatever the drink happened to be, those doughty old fellows drank it off in deep draughts. ' ' The caldron holds about a hundred and twenty gallons and was probably a garrison cooking pot, made for Sir John Talbot, the one to whom the familiar old couplet refers : " There's nothing left of Talbot's name But Talhot's pot and Talbot's lane." 6 81 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON As we were wandering about the streets this morning, feeling homeless and houseless in this strange town, having sent our luggage to the railway station and not yet having secured an abiding place, we suddenly found ourselves at the entrance of the Church of St. Mary. After admiring the handsome reredos of black and white marble, and examining the remarkable tomb of the first Thomas Beauchamp and his Countess, whose effigies are surrounded by over thirty niches containing figures supposed to represent relatives of the noble Earl, we turned our steps towards the magnificent Beauchamp Chapel, which you and I enjoyed so much one rainy morning five years ago. Walter had never seen this chapel and was delighted with it, of course, and especially enthusiastic over the tomb of Eichard Beauchamp, Earl of War- wick, the founder, who died in 1499. Here, as almost everywhere, the old workmanship is so much finer than the modern. You may remem- ber this really noble monument of gray marble with its effigy of the Earl in gilt brass, sur- rounded by fourteen noble and titled weepers in their respective niches, the male weepers in mantles or mourning habits and the women in low-cut bodices with mitred head-dresses and short mourning tippets hanging over their 82 IN WARWICKSHIRE backs. The Earl is represented in full armor, his head resting upon a tilting helmet, near it a brass swan, the white swan of Avon, and at his feet the muzzled bear and griffin of his an- cient line. The tomb of Eobert Dudley, Earl of Leices- ter, and his second wife, is quite near, very ornate, as you may remember, but much less beautiful than that of Eichard Beauchamp, with a massive superstructure and under it a semi- circular recess, which contains a long Latin inscription, and orders without end, French and English. Here lies the once powerful favorite of Queen Elizabeth, with all his honors, titles and armorial bearings emblazoned upon his tomb, and along the sides of this remarkable structure are arched canopies containing small figures representing the virtues, and above all and quite as appropriate, the motto, "Droit et loyal." I remember how indignant you were at the thought of the noble Lady Lettice lying here in this gorgeous tomb beside her Lord, while the disowned and rejected Amy Eobsart, quite as truly Lady Dudley, lies unhonored beneath the chancel of St. Mary's Church in Oxford. It is some satisfaction to know that the rich and tasteless monument was erected by "the ex- 83 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON cellent and pious Lady Lettice" herself, who survived her husband by many years, and also that one has to come to Warwick to be reminded that such a person existed, while, thanks to Sir Walter Scott, the beauty and the sorrows of Amy Eobsart are known wherever the English language is spoken. We were reading the Latin inscription on the recess back of the tomb and trying to identify the several virtues that adorned the canopy, when a familiar voice behind us exclaimed: "All of the virtues, indeed! If the Earl of Leicester possessed the virtues, I should like to know where the vices are to be found ! ' ' We turned, to find Miss Cassandra West and Lydia Mott standing behind us. Nothing could have been more opportune, although we were not, as Walter explained, like the newly married couple in one of Marion Crawford's novels, ready to welcome any outside distraction whether from friend or foe. Aside from our genuine liking for Miss West and her pretty niece, she proved herself again the Peterkin's "Lady from Philadelphia'* and at once set about solving our riddles. Not only did Miss Cassandra provide us with accommodations in the hotel in which she was stopping, but she made up our minds for us as well, a really val- IN WARWICKSHIRE uable service to a traveller and a great saving of time. We had not been able to decide whether we should devote this brilliantly beau- tiful day to Kenilworth or to Stratford. So few perfectly clear days had fallen to our lot of late that Walter declares that when we have one it goes to our heads like champagne and confuses us, and here was dear Miss Cassandra coming to our rescue with a carriage and well- arranged plan for a morning at Kenilworth. We were soon bowling along, over fine roads and through a fertile, well-wooded country by Guy's Cliff, the castle of the gigantic slayer of the legendary dun cow. The best view of this picturesque castle is to be had from the ruins of an old mill near the road, which is itself interesting as dating back to Saxon England. Later and more peaceful associations of Guy's Cliff House are connected with the tragic actress Mrs. Siddons, who lived here in her youth, and with the young artist Greatheed. The property is now the seat of Lord Percy, and the house is shown to visitors in the absence of the family. Our driver informed us, with an air of author- ity, that the house was not to be seen as the family was now in residence, and that his brother was head gardener at the Cliff House. "Evidently a very important position," said 85 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Walter, "about next to the Lord Chancellor's." The man, for whom this remark was not in- tended, heard it and assented with a smiling countenance, not possessing a particularly keen sense of humor, or thinking perhaps that the comparison referred to Lord Percy himself. Kenilworth, like fair Melrose, to be seen aright should be visited by the pale moonlight ; but even in the garish light of day the castle lends itself to the history and romance that are inseparably associated with its ruinous chambers and massive ivy-grown walls. Having entered through Leicester's gate- house and passed on by the Norman keep, we crossed the ancient kitchen in which feasts were prepared for Queen Elizabeth and her retinue, and on to the great banqueting hall in which they were served. This noble hall with its two beautiful, almost perfect oriel windows, was built by John of Gaunt, ' ' the time-honored Lan- caster." Quite near is the Strong Tower or Mervyn's Tower, whose small octagonal room on the second floor is still to be reached by a narrow winding stone stairway. It was in this room that Sir Walter Scott placed Lady Amy Dudley when she made her ill-starred journey to Kenilworth under the protection of Wayland. The room, with its stone floors and thick walls, IN WARWICKSHIRE looks like a prison, although from the window there is a charming view of an orchard and gar- den which now occupy the site of what was once the Pleasance. It was in this Pleasance, then "decorated with statues, arches, trophies, foun- tains, and other architectural monuments, ' ' that Tressilian wandered, paying little heed to the beauties of nature and art which surrounded him, his mind being absorbed by thoughts of his lost love, Amy, whom he knew to be in danger, but in how great danger, or how near to him at that moment, he was quite ignorant. As I stood in the little tower chamber looking out upon the Pleasance with its orchard and garden, and upon the reaches of green meadow beyond, my mind, like Tressilian 'a, quite filled with thoughts of Amy Eobsart, a voice that seemed to come from the floor below, an infi- nitely pathetic voice, broke forth in these words : Now nought was heard beneath the skies, The sounds of busy life were still, Save an unhappy lady's sighs, That issued from that lonely pile. " Leicester," she cried, " is this thy love That thou so oft hast sworn to me, To leave me in this lonely grove, Immured in shameful privity?" 87 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Thus sore and sad that lady grieved, In Cumnor Hall, so lone and drear; And many a heartfelt sigh she heaved, And let fall many a bitter tear. And ere the dawn of day appear*d, In Cumnor Hall, so lone and drear, Full many a piercing scream was heard, And many a cry of mortal fear. The death-bell thrice was heard to ring, An aerial voice was heard to call, And thrice the raven flapp'd its wing Around the towers of Cumnor Hall. Full many a traveller oft hath sigh'd, And pensive wept the Countess' fall, As wandering onwards they've espied The haunted towers of Cumnor Hall. The lines so perfectly fitted the scene, and I was so completely under the spell of Kenil- worth and the Northern Wizard who described it, that I never stopped to think whether the voice was of the past or of the present; there may have been tears in my eyes, I do not know, I only know that I was aroused from my sad reverie by Walter's voice at my side, saying very gently, "Don't take it quite so hard, Zel- phine; you know that Amy never really came 88 IN WARWICKSHIRE to Kenilworth, and the great pageant took place long after her death." "I don't care," I said; "Sir Walter Scott pictured her here and I shall always think of her in this little room, no matter what dates and facts say about it. And those verses did you ever hear anything so weird and touching?" "The ghost of the Ladye Amye," said Wal- ter. "She does not appear by daylight, she only recites." "Now, really, Walter, do you think that some one is kept here to repeat those verses when parties of visitors arrive?" "Aunt Cassie has a wonderful memory," said Lydia Mott, her head just then appearing above the stairway, as if in answer to my question, ' ' and she always seems to have her poetry on tap." Something more than a good memory, a gift of sympathy and a power that we should call dramatic if she were not a good Quakeress, enabled Miss Cassandra to enter so completely into the spirit of the place and its associations and so to carry us with her (Walter, too, despite his jesting) that the years were swept aside like a veil and we shared for the moment Amy Eob- sart's sorrows, her hopes, and her fears. When we questioned Miss Cassandra about the poem, she said that it was to be found in 89 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Evan's Ancient Ballads, that Walter Scott had been impressed by it in his boyhood, and that it first attracted him to the sad story of Amy Robsart. It is odd that she is called Countess of Leicester in the ballad and in Sir Walter Scott's novel, although she was only Lady Dud- ley, as it appears that Robert Dudley did not receive his title of Earl Leicester until after the death of his first wife. We selfishly rejoiced that no other tourists or "trippers" were at Kenilworth to-day to dis- turb our reveries, and, a rather quiet party, we drove away from this monument of the Earl of Leicester's pride, his ambition, and his heart- less cruelty. Miss Cassandra suggested a drive to Cumnor Hall while our minds were filled with thoughts of Amy Eobsart, but the driver's common sense acted as a check to our enthusiasm. He advised us to visit Cumnor from Oxford, a drive of about four miles from that town; but, with an amiable desire to humor our fancies, he sug- gested an afternoon excursion to the Leicester Hospital at the west end of High Street, where some relics of Lady Amye Dudley, as her name is written in some of the old chronicles, are still to be seen. "By all means!" exclaimed Miss Cassandra. 90 IN WARWICKSHIRE "Let us go to the Hospital and see something good that Leicester has left behind him. We have seen quite enough of the evil. Did you notice the tomb and effigy of his little deformed son at St. Mary's? The child's rich gown is decorated with fleur-de-lys, cinquefoils, and ragged staves, a collar of lace is around his neck, and his poor little feet rest upon the muzzled bear of the Beauchamps. The inscrip- tion, perhaps you did not stop to read it, proclaims ' this noble impe scion Robert of Dud- ley, Baron of Denbigh, sonne of Robert, Earl of Leycester, nephew and heir unto Ambrose, Erie of Warwike,' then there follows a line of titled and princely ancestors and kinsfolk longer than the four-year-old child himself." Yes, we had noticed the tomb of the "noble impe," and we were wondering whether this was Leicester's only child, as he seems to have left no heir to his many titles and vast estates. "Perhaps," said Miss West, with whom it seemed impossible to look long on the dark side of any character, "it was the sufferings and early death of this little son that softened the heart of the Earl, and led him to do something to lighten the burdens of humanity." In view of these charitable reflections, we were in a most suitable frame of mind to visit 91 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Leicester's foundation; but we did not go to the hospital this afternoon, as our coachman made still another suggestion. A garden party was being given in the grounds of Warwick Castle this very day, an excellent opportunity, he said, to see the park and gardens at their best. If it was our pleasure, our Jehu would drive us to the old stone bridge over the Avon, from which there is a fine view of the castle, and afterwards take us to a little garden cafe for our luncheon. Of course it was our pleasure to fall in with a plan so well arranged. The view of Warwick Castle from the Avon bridge is superb. No cas- tle that we have seen elsewhere, no palace of a sovereign, exceeds in stately beauty this ancient home of Eichard Neville, the King-maker, or more perfectly fulfils our conception of what the stronghold of a great and powerful baron should be. You and I saw Warwick Castle through mist and rain, but standing out in the sunshine to-day, its gray machicolated towers and long line of battlements outlined against a sky of delicate steel blue, with a foreground of verdant meadow-land through which the silver Avon flows softly, it presented to our eyes a scene of ideal beauty, only made real by the massive- ness of its stone walls and huge buttresses. 92 IN WARWICKSHIRE A day away from lodging-houses and inns is in itself a delight, and the simple luncheon served to us in the little garden cafe under the shadow of the castle walls was more than satis- fying. As we lingered over our plum tart, Walter proposed the health of the coachman, who was standing near the entrance gate. This we drank in ginger beer of the landlady's own make. We wondered why she looked so pleased, smiling and blushing, as she stood before us opening the bottles, until Miss West, with her clever way of getting at the root of things, discovered that the coachman, whom we were toasting in his own beer, was her husband. Could a Yankee from the land of the wooden nutmeg have done better ? The additional drive to the bridge over the Avon, the dinner at the inn, and perhaps a share of the fee of a shilling from each one as we entered the grounds, were all admirably arranged. "Well, I 'm satisfied to have him make some- thing off us," said Miss Cassandra, as we passed the embattled gateway and into a wind- ing road cut out of the solid rock. "He has added so much to our pleasure. Nothing could be more delightful than this, and after all, when you reflect upon it, where did the Yankees come from, if not from England?" 93 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Miss Cassandra 's conundrum would probably have led to an animated discussion under ordi- nary circumstances, but the view from the outer court of Guy's Tower rising before us on one side and Caesar's Tower on the other, both an- cient and massive yet exquisitely symmetrical, claimed our attention to the exclusion of every- thing else. Walter was much interested in the boldly projecting machicolations near the top of Caesar's Tower and the sloping base from which, he says, missiles thrown from the top would be deflected into the ranks of the attack- ing party a most ingenious device! The gateway with its barbican was once pro- tected by a drawbridge. Now the ancient moat is bridged by an arch. 1 'If only this drawbridge were in working order we could feel that we were living over again the pages of Scott!" I exclaimed, as we passed over the arch and through the second gate. "You have lived quite enough in the pages of Scott to-day, Zelphine. The present scene is more wholesome and far more to my taste," said Walter, as the great gates swung open, revealing to our eyes a vista of enchanting loveliness. I wish I could give you some idea of the beauty of that sylvan scene ; a combina- 94 IN WARWICKSHIRE tion of the richest exuberance of nature and the most skilful cultivation. You know that I love the wild beauty of our own forests and the rich verdure of our pasture-lands, but really, now don't laugh at me, I felt that I had never seen trees or grass before. Our feet sank into the greensward so far, that I was afraid they would never come out again, and the great cedars of Lebanon and the giant oaks and beeches reach- ing out their sheltering arms made refreshing coverts from the afternoon sun. The peacocks strutting about under the trees, with their grand and stately air, gave the needed touch of color and animation to the picture. At the other end of this vast park there was life and anima- tion to spare, for here were the marquees in which vegetables, flowers, and fruit were ex- hibited. The space around them was thronged with judges, competitors, and a large company of spectators, including many " trippers" and tourists like ourselves. We spent little time over the huge cabbages and overgrown turnips and marrows in the marquees, but the wall-fruit, the exquisite peaches and plums, flanked by the most gor- geous roses, dahlias, foxgloves and other flow- ers of brilliant hue, held us fast by their beauty and fragrance. 95 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON The Countess of Warwick was not present to-day, to our regret, but we had the pleasure of seeing her sister, Lady Gordon Lenox, giv- ing prizes for the fruit, flowers, and vegetables. She was charming in a mauve gown and large black hat, and with her mother and a young daughter of the Countess of Warwick, the Vis- countess Hammersley, in white muslin and blue ribbons, the trio presented a most attractive picture of three generations of aristocrats. However it may please certain democratic Americans to " Smile at the claims of long descent," there is a certain indefinable quality that be- longs to these high-born Englishwomen, some- thing in their exquisite dignity and repose, that stamps them with the "caste of Vere de Vere." We quite enjoyed this scene from high life, and the form and ceremony attending the presentation of the prizes, Miss Cassandra as much as the younger and more frivolous mem- bers of the party, for Quaker as she is, she dearly loves a bit of purple. In passing through the great hall of the castle, where, by the flickering light of torches, Piers Gaveston was tried and condemned to death, and in the state dining-room, we saw 96 IN WARWICKSHIRE many portraits of high-born dames, none more beautiful to our thinking than that of the pres- ent Countess of Warwick. Before quitting the Castle we walked around by the conservatory to see the famous "Warwick Vase," which came from Hadrian's Villa. You will be seeing the villa soon. Ah ! what interesting and beau- tiful things are to be seen in this round world ! One would surely need to be in two places at once to compass them all in the brief span of life that is ours ! July 22nd. A fine rain was falling this morning, which did not prevent our taking the coach to Strat- ford, nor did it interfere with our comfort, as we were well protected, and by the time we reached our journey's end the sun was shining fitfully. As we had both been to Stratford be- fore, we had the delightful feeling of owing it no obligation as sightseers. Strolling at will through the quaint old streets, with their many timbered houses, we realized as never before how entirely this town is shut off from the ordinary business of life, and how complete it is in itself as the shrine of the poet of all time, whose name we found, with singular inappro- priateness, inscribed upon the burial records of the church as "Will Shakespeare, Gent,'* 7 97 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON "The ancient is absolutely on top here," as Walter expresses it, ' ' and there is nothing new but the Jubilee Walk, the great bridge over the Avon, the Memorial Fountain, and a few trifles, upon which it is easy to turn our backs and forget that we are living in the present century. ' ' At this moment, as if to contradict his words, and just as we were entering the Shakespeare house on Henley Street, a sound of many voices reached our ears, and turning we saw a host of Cook's tourists ready and able to overcome, by their numbers and quality, the most pene- trating and romantic associations. One voice rising above the others reached our ears: "Well, I have sometimes felt like believing in the Bacon theory, but this old house and the grave in the church knocks Bacon 'into a cocked hat.' " We agreed with the speaker entirely and yet we were not disposed to claim her as a countrywoman. "They have evidently been to the church," said Walter, in a tone of relief. "Let us go there first and come back to the house when peace has been restored." The lime avenue is as beautiful as ever, and the old elms and the Gothic bridge and the IN WARWICKSHIRE poetry and charm of the church, as it stands upon the Avon near where it "to the Severn flows." We stopped to examine the sanctuary knocker to whose great iron ring many a fugi- tive has doubtless clung and found protection; but once inside the church we felt, with Wash- ington Irving, that it was impossible to dwell upon anything that is not connected with Shakespeare. "His idea pervades the place; the whole pile seems but as his mausoleum. The feelings no longer checked and thwarted by doubt, here indulge in perfect confidence." Standing in the chancel we blessed the grue- some inscription upon the flat stone in the floor, which has prevented and will forever prevent the removing of the ashes of the poet to any less fitting spot. Walking afterwards by the soft flowing Avon, by whose " silver stream Of things more than mortal sweet, Shakespeare would dream," we enjoyed the indescribable beauty of the miniature scene, the picturesque old church on the river, and the Memorial Building which is really fine and needs only the softening touch of time to subdue its color into a hue more in harmony with its surroundings. 99 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON We went to the Bed Horse Hotel because Washington Irving had stopped there, and saw a chair that he sat in, and the poker with which he stirred the fire, when he asked himself, " Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" The Eed Horse was not a place for ease or comfort to-day, as it was infested by American tourists of the class that excited Mr. Edgar Fawcett's wrath when he wrote about those "who seat themselves on the ruins of the Acropolis at Athens and discuss the probable engagement of Jane Briggs, the belle of East Brighamyoungtown, Utah, to James Diggs, an acknowledged Beau Brummel of the same village." ' 'I wonder why they came," I said, not ex- pecting an answer, but rather thinking aloud. "Many of them for the sake of having been to Shakespeare's town," said Walter, while a pleasant-faced English lady, who was standing near us, said, "Do you know that of the thirty thousand and more visitors who come to Strat- ford annually nearly a fourth are your com- patriots?" We did not know this and quite agreed with the speaker that these tourists were doing a good work in helping to keep up this place. As we walked toward a little tea-house, where our 100 IN WARWICKSHIRE new acquaintance told us we should find a good luncheon and the blessing of a quiet room, she remarked quite seriously, "Americans seem quite different to what they used to be. They used to talk like English people, but now so many of them had a lingo of their own," concluding, with a rising inflection of her deli- cious voice, "Is it not so?" There was noth- ing in the slightest degree rude in the lady's question, as in some indefinable and graceful fashion, only possible to the well bred, she gave us to understand that she did not include us in her query. We tried to explain to her that the American en voyage is not always the best representative of his nation, and Walter said that she had probably been so unfortunate as to meet some of our compatriots who had made money rapidly and had not enjoyed educational advantages equal to their fortunes, adding, "These men and women belong to a class which in England would not travel extensively. With us, it is different; the American who makes money usually has an ambition to see the world. These people may appear crude and ignorant, but they will learn something before they go away, and even the superficial knowledge that they gain of your older civilizations will stimu- late them to read and study at home, and their 101 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON children will come to these old countries better prepared to appreciate what they see. ' ' The lady exclaimed, "Keally! fancy!" with the most charming expression of interest and intelligence, but I doubt her grasping the situa- tion at all; it is so impossible for English people to understand America and Americans. Wasn't it fine of Walter to rise so valiantly to the sup- port of his unappreciated compatriots whom we have been dodging all morning? We had an hour in the Shakespeare house such a comfortable looking old house it is! The home of well-to-do people, I should say. You surely remember the great fireplace with the closets for hanging the bacon on each side, and the lovely garden at the back, set about with the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays pansies, violets, rosemary, rue, and all the rest. Anne Hathaway 's garden looked very gay, this afternoon, with its many old-fashioned flowers. I brought away some lavender for you, as you and I thought it the sweetest we had ever smelled. There is some very nice china and furniture in the cottage, especially a handsome, richly-carved bedstead with a piece of Anne's needlework upon it. This bedstead is quite worthy of the "best feather bed," 102 IN WARWICKSHIRE which, according to Dr. Furness, Anne already owned when her husband left her the much- talked-of "second best feather bed." Most interesting of all is the room on the first floor with the settle by the fireplace where William and Anne were wont to sit during their court- ship. Do I believe in all of these associations ? Yes, you know well that I have never joined the ever increasing army of doubters who are al- most as bad as the Baconians. When Walter and I were looking over some of the earlier editions of the plays in the Shakespeare house, it seemed to us that everything could be proved from these old folios. One interested us espe- cially, a volume of 1623 which belonged to one Digges; on the fly-leaf are some verses about the deceased author, Mr. William Shakespeare, which I tried to copy for you and which I failed to do because the writing is so difficult and the spelling so original. OXFOKD, July 23rd. We have come here to meet Miss Cassandra and Miss Lydia and take the drive to Cumnor. Before we left Warwick, this morning, we made our visit to the Lord Leycester Hospital, as they call it there, a most interesting old foundation for twelve poor brothers. The quaint, half- timbered building, with its many gables, is of 103 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON earlier date than the rest of the hospital, and the old quadrangle is very picturesque. Leicester's cognizance is frequently repeated throughout the building, but what interested us particularly were the memorials of Amy Dudley, an elaborate piece of needlework by her, and, strange to relate, framed and hung up on one side of the wall are the selfsame verses that Miss Cassandra repeated to us at Kenilworth. We drove to Cumnor this afternoon. It is only four miles from Oxford, and I here and now frankly confess that we were grievously disappointed. Even the old inn where Tressi- lian stopped is quite different from the fascinat- ing five-gabled house, with the sign of the bear and ragged staff on a high pole, as it appears in the illustrated editions of Kenilworth. An- thony Foster's house has suffered the fate of the dwellings of the wicked in the Scriptures; there is absolutely nothing left of it except an old fireplace. The church, which is quite near the house, and very ancient, is the only building in good condition. Here we found a curious statue of Queen Elizabeth, said to have been sculptured by order of the Earl of Leicester. It once stood as an ornament in the gardens of Cumnor Place, 104 IN WARWICKSHIRE one of his many compliments to his royal mis- tress. The stone figure seemed strangely out of place in this old church of St. Michael's; but still more incongruous is the handsome monu- ment in memory of Anthony Foster and his wife, with kneeling figures, blazonings and a laudatory inscription, in which he is described as, " Meet Scion of a gentle ancestry, The Lord of Cumnor Berks, was Anthony." Upon reading these words, and the several compliments inscribed upon the tomb. Miss Cas- sandra's indignation knew no bounds, and, as she says, "Why should Leicester have placed such an inscription over Anthony Foster if not to cover up his own guilt?'* Even if it cannot be proved that he and Leicester connived at the death of Amy Dudley, the circumstances surrounding it were most suspicious. All the servants were away from Cumnor Place at the time, and coming home late from the Abingdon Fair they found poor Amy's dead body upon the floor at the foot of a flight of steps. There were tales of some insecure boards in the floor- ing of her room, so placed that they would give way at the pressure of the lightest foot-fall, but nothing was proved at the trial and now Cumnor Hall is level with the ground and can 106 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON tell no tales. Is it not all gruesome and sad? And as if to make these tragic associations with Amy Dudley more real, we are living nearly opposite the church of St. Mary the Virgin, in whose choir she is buried ; and one of the scenes represented in the great historic pageant held here early in the summer was her funeral pro- cession. Passing through the streets through which the cortege passed in September, 1560, from Gloucester Hall to St. Mary's, the Vice Chancellor leading and a number of the mem- bers of the University in gowns and hoods walking beside the coffin, bearing heraldic ban- ners, the scene must have been much more im- pressive than such representations usually are. All the records prove that Lord Dudley did not follow his wife's body to the grave, consequently he was not a figure in this pro- cession, although he was conspicuous in some gayer scenes, as when Queen Elizabeth was received at Oxford and at Kenilworth. The town still resounds with echoes of the pageant, and the shop windows are filled with pictures and pamphlets about it. A young man in one of the book-shops told me with pride that he had taken the part of the Lord Chancellor. Some English dowagers in the hotel, large, florid dames, with such structures of tulle and 106 IN WARWICKSHIRE flowers upon their heads as are only to be found in the British Isles, showed an amiable desire to converse with us this evening. We asked them some questions about the pageant, of which they had spoken several times. They gave us the desired information, but in a tone of evident condescension and with so marked a note of contempt for a nation that could not boast its thousands of years of history, that Lydia Mott's freeborn American spirit was thoroughly aroused and she suddenly sailed in and had what Walter calls "her innings." Lydia is one of the rare people who do not speak unless they have something to say, when she does speak it is to some purpose, and upon this occasion she waxed eloquent. After expatiating upon the picturesqueness of our American Indian life, she described at length our own pageant in commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the settle- ment of Pennsylvania. Although she must have been a child at the time, she remembered all the details far better than I did. "And where did those settlers that you speak of come from?" asked the first dowager. "From England, " replied Lydia, somewhat surprised at the question, and then rallying to the charge. ' ' They were Quakers who were 107 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON so badly treated in England that they had to come to America for protection." "Fancy!" exclaimed the second dowager. "I think I have heard of the Quakers. They wore strange clothes and spoke quite ungrammati- cally, I believe." "I don't know about that," replied Lydia, nothing daunted; "that is, after all, quite a matter of opinion." Miss Cassandra looked unutterable things at me, but kept her lips firmly closed. Lydia then proceeded to outline certain pageants that could be given in America. The landing of John Smith and his company at Jamestown; the arrival of the Plymouth Set- tlers; William Penn's Treaty with the Indians, and the surrender of Yorktown. The latter scene was described with so much spirit that the dowagers might have taken it for granted that Lydia had been present at the ceremony. But alas for the narrator and her eloquence! The first dowager, instead of expressing intel- ligent interest, or looking the least bit crest- fallen over the superlative importance of American antiquities, said, with an inquiring look in her eyes and a rising inflection in her voice, "Yorktown? We never say Yorktown; it is just York; it is a very ancient city, once 108 IN WARWICKSHIRE occupied by the Romans. They say that one of the Roman emperors built the walls. Per- haps he is the one who surrendered." Can you imagine such density? Lydia was speechless, at last, but an intelligent looking young Englishman, who had been listening to the conversation, explained to his country- woman that the surrender had taken place in America and was of comparatively recent oc- currence. Then, his British pride being touched by Lydia 's patriotic harangue, he very adroitly took up the cudgels for his own country by saying that the officer to whom Lord Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown was really an Englishman, his family only having been in America for two or three generations. Clever, was it not? Turning again to Lydia, he said very civilly, "I have never been in the States, but I have been in Canada and in the citadel at Quebec, on the summit of that almost impreg- nable natural fortress, which our General Wolfe captured from the French, I saw a cannon which was taken by us from the Americans at Bun- ker Hill." "Yes," said Miss Cassandra, suddenly en- tering the arena, "the British may have taken the cannon, but we kept the hill!" A hearty laugh followed this rejoinder and 109 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON the Englishman, with a good humor and cour- tesy that won our admiration, bowed to Miss Cassandra, saying, "I have heard much of American valor; but of American wit I have now had a practical illustration." Was it not delightful to have our Quaker lady come off with such flying colors? And so, in gay good humor with our respective nations, we said good-night to each other, as I say it to you, Margaret, only wishing that you had been pres- ent at the war of wits. V A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE LONDON, July 25th. Miss CASSANDRA persuaded us to accompany her to Stoke Poges and Jordans. We had in- tended to spend Sunday on Lake Windermere, but she says that a pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas Gray and William Penn is a perfect Sabbath day's journey, and that I owe it to my Quaker ancestors to visit Jordans. As usual Miss Cassandra's logic and eloquence prevailed. I had never thought much about Jordans but I had always longed to see the Stoke Poges church, and Walter is ready to go where Miss Cassandra leads, she so appeals to his sense of humor. He says that "we are like Sandford and Merton with Mr. Day when we set forth in the company of her well-stored mind, only immensely jollier." We left Oxford by an early train, or rather as early a train as one can take on a Sunday morning, when so much diplomacy is needed in order to secure breakfast before nine o'clock, in AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON but after all our exertions we had to wait so long at Beading for the London train that we did not reach the Slough station until noon. Walter set about securing a conveyance while we ordered luncheon at the inn. The coachmen at the "livery" were all out, but fortunately the proprietor himself had just come in for his dinner and offered to drive us to Stoke Poges and Jordans with his own team. This was great good fortune for us as Mr. Croft knows the country well, and after we had become accus- tomed to his language (which is English, of course, but quite different from the kind spoken in America) we found him a most helpful and suggestive guide. We drove to the church, St. Giles, Gray's church, which is less than two miles from Slough. The approach is through a short pri- vate road, and by a charmingly picturesque ivy covered lodge, from which there is a fine view of Stoke Manor House in the distance, across a broad sweep of deer park. On a knoll to the right of the lodge, marking the place where the poet sat when he wrote the greater part of the Elegy, is Wyatt's ungraceful, inappropriate monument, which strikes the one jarring note in the otherwise perfectly harmonious scene. One can think of nothing but the Elegy here, and 112 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE the spot where it was finished, under "the yew tree's shade" by the quaint church porch, is much more to our taste. The woman in charge gave us a bit of the yew, which is said to be nine hundred years old, and showed us the "ivy-mantled tower," and the tomb in which the author of the Elegy, his mother and his aunt all rest. There is a tablet upon the church opposite the tomb saying that Thomas Gray is buried here, and on the square stone vault is the inscription that the poet placed there, surely the most tender tribute from a son to his mother ! Beside her friend and sister here sleep the remains of DOROTHY GRAY, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her. She died March 11, 1753, aged 72. No more fitting spot than this could be found for a poet's last resting place, the great yew, the cypresses and the ivy-mantled church are a poem in themselves, in the lovely setting of this peaceful English landscape. Inside the church we were shown the Grays' pew, and even more interesting to me the large Penn pew, really 8 113 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON a good-sized room, with a diamond-paned win- dow, and a large stove to heat it. In the pew are a half dozen beautiful old carved Penn chairs. . I was fancying little William Penn seated on one of these chairs between his father and mother, when Miss Cassandra dispelled all my illusions by telling us that it was Wil- liam Penn's son, Thomas, who owned Stoke Park and worshipped in this pew with his fam- ily, in proof of which she showed me a tablet on the north wall of the church, which records the fact that Thomas Penn, his wife, Lady Juli- ana Fermor, and several children and grand- children are buried in the vault beneath. Do you remember that the guide at Windsor Castle pointed out the Stoke Poges Manor House, standing upon a distant hilltop, and plainly visible from the terrace, as "the home in which William Penn brought up his large family of children"? We knew, of course, that this was a mistake; but it is one that might readily be made by a more intelligent person than a guide, as so many associations with Wil- liam Penn belong to this Chalfont region, whither he came acourting his Gulielma and where he spent the early years of his married life. It would be impossible for us, who are under the informing tutelage of Miss Cassandra 114 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE and Mr. Croft, to make any very serious mis- takes; indeed Walter says that he is so thor- oughly steeped in the history and traditions of the Penn family that he is quite prepared to stand examination before any historical society in the United States. There is a village of Penn and an old Penn church near Chalfont, but Mr. Croft assures us that these Penns of Bucks had no close con- nection with our Pennsylvania Penns, who were of the Wiltshire family. I never realized how much romance there was in William Penn's courtship until Miss Cas- sandra told us the story as we drove up hill and down dale to Jordans Meeting House. She has also introduced us to some delightful books which she has with her. 'Her dress-suit case, like mine, is heavy with books. In one of these, written by a descendant of Governor Penn, we found a charming picture of Gulielma Springett and her mother, the widow of a Puritan officer, Sir William Springett. After her husband's death Lady Springett, finding London life dis- tasteful to her, came to live at Chalfont St. Giles with her little daughter. Here she was warmly welcomed by a choice circle of interesting men and women, which often included the poet Mil- ton and his secretary, Thomas Ellwood. Alter 115 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON several year of widowhood, Lady Springett married Isaac Penington, and at his home, the Grange, Guli, as she was called by her friends, a Puritan by inheritance and naturally pre- disposed toward a protesting religion, grew up a lovely Quaker maiden, beautiful and an heiress withal. Guli's hand was sought after by many young squires of the country side. Thomas Ellwood, who taught her Latin, was not insensible to the charms of the pretty Qua- keress, but he, as he wrote, "ever governed himself in a free and respectful carriage toward her." Guli, fortunately for herself, held de- cided opinions upon the choice of a husband, and so this pearl of womanhood was reserved for the young Quaker cavalier, who met her at the home of her stepfather, Isaac Penington. There is a charming allusion to his successful courtship in a letter written by Penn to his wife and children just before his first visit to Penn- sylvania. After urging his children to obey their mother, who was, he says, "the love of my youth and much the joy of my life," the good Proprietary indulges in this refreshing bit of self gratulation; "Love her, too, for she loved your father with a deep and upright love, choos- ing him before all of her many suitors." Is it not interesting to think of William Penn 116 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE as young and handsome, rejoicing in his youth and caring somewhat for the things of this world? Miss Cassandra scoffs at all of our pre- conceived ideas of the Proprietary, who was, she says, not only handsome but possessed of rare charm of manner, and dressed like most young gentlemen of his time, even wearing a sword in his early youth, as Pepys speaks of his forgetting it and leaving it behind him in the carriage. "Did we think," she asks, "that William Penn was born old and sedate?" Wal- ter reminded her of the story of the man who said he had "never seen a dead donkey or a Quaker baby," at which our serious driver laughed immoderately, and so in a merry mood we drove down the long steep hill at whose feet, in a lovely, well-wooded valley, stands the plainest and most primitive of meeting-houses. We entered the enclosure through a little wicket gate and made our way to the small white headstones that mark the graves of Mary and Isaac Penington, Thomas Ellwood, and those of William Penn, his first wife, Gulielma, and Hannah Penn, the wise and devoted com- panion of his declining years; "for whom," said Miss Cassandra, "he wrote at the time of his marriage that he had 'long felt an extraor- dinary esteem/ " "Which is, I suppose, the 117 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON proper and moderate language to use in speak- ing of a second wife, ' ' I said, not thinking much of what I was saying; but Walter looked sur- prised and was evidently so distressed by my foolish words that I was sorry that I had spoken them, while Miss Cassandra, blissfully ignorant of personalities, expatiated upon the loveliness of Gulielma, although willing to admit that Hannah Callowhill was an excellent woman, and a judicious and helpful companion for a man over-burdened with cares, religious and secular. Near the graves of their father and mother are those of several children who died in in- fancy and that of Springett Penn, who lived until early manhood and was his father's de- voted friend and companion, a great contrast to roystering young William Penn, Jr., who "beat the watch" and otherwise scandalized the staid Quaker citizens of old Philadelphia. To visit Jordans with Miss Cassandra West is like approaching the shrine of a saint with a good Catholic. She was so deeply moved and impressed upon this, her first visit to the tombs of these early Friends, that she was in a quite ecstatic state. "My dear," she said, "there were no better Christians in the world than these Friends. Such men and women as Guli- elma and William Penn, Isaac Penington and 118 JORDAN'S WITH THE PENN GRAVES INTERIOR OF MEETING HOUSE AT JORDANS A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE his wife, and Robert Barely of Ury, were sanc- tified spirits, and the England of their day was unworthy of them, whatever mistakes may have been made later." Miss Cassandra is uncom- promisingly orthodox, and in spite of her breadth of mind has scant toleration for dis- senting Quakers. Walter confided to me, afterwards, that he and Lydia Mott had serious misgivings as to whether they should be able to get us away from the grave-yard before nightfall. They were anxious, as we had been an hour earlier, to stop at Chalfont St. Giles to see the Milton house and to drive through the Burnham Beeches by daylight. As it happened, a family party of English people, on bicycles, " major, minor, and minimus," arrived oppor- tunely, and as they were taking their pleasure less solemnly than ourselves, they broke in upon our musings with their merry talk and so drove us away. The caretaker, who with her family lives in a part of the meeting-house, showed us the plain little room in which occasional meetings are still held. Finally, with our hands full of pretty little blue and purple flowers, which they call "Quaker ladies' bonnets," we set forth toward Chalfont St. Giles. We drove by Bottrels, the 119 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON old farmhouse in which Thomas Ellwood lived while he was tutoring the young Peningtons and acting as secretary to Milton, who was then living at the "pretty box," a mile distant, which is still reached by a winding lane. We re- gretted that we had not more time to spend in this picturesque little town and in the "pretty box," in which there are a number of relics of the poet. It was while he was living at this house at Chalfont St. Giles, whither Ellwood had persuaded Milton to remove with his fam- ily from London in order to escape the Great Plague of 1665, that the poet finished Paradise Lost. When questioned as to what he thought of the book, Ellwood said, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise regained?" Later, when Ellwood visited Milton in London, he showed his visitor the second poem, and said, "This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by a question you put to me at Chalfont, which be- fore I had not thought of." The church, another St. Giles, we are won- dering why the crippled saint so dominates this region, with its Norman tower, very quaint old lych gate, and ancient brasses and monu- ments, is most interesting. We had not time to enjoy it thoroughly; but were glad of even 120 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE the little glimpse that we had of it and of the odd, old houses near it. Lydia secured what she considers a precious treasure in the inscription from Timothy Lovett's tombstone, in the churchyard, which she copied. It appears that this Timothy Lovett, a courier, was employed to carry dispatches to and from the Duke of Marlborough during his campaigns, hence the lines : " Italy and Spain, Germany and Franc Have been on earth My weary dance. So that I own Ye grave my greatest friend, That to my travels All has put an end." From the churchyard there is a fine view of the Stone Meadows, where a cricket match was in full swing, which, of course, interested Wal- ter, especially when Mr. Croft told him that a famous cricketing family, the Hearns, are na- tives of Chalfont St. Giles. What interested me more was to know that Oliver Cromwell's army had spent the night here after the bat- tles of Aylesbury and camped under the great elms. We had not even a half hour for Beaconsfield, although it was on our homeward route, and 121 I should have loved to visit the tomb of Edmund Burke and to have stopped to place a rose upon that of Waller in memory of his "Go, lovely rose." Do you happen to remember Waller's clever answer when Charles II taxed him with making better verses about the Protector than upon his own ' * Happy Return " f " Poets, your Majesty, succeed better in fiction than in truth," was the witty reply. There are so many places we should like to see, Chenies, where are the remarkable Bus- sell monuments; "the House of Eussell robed in alabaster and painted," as Horace Walpole described the curious effect of the pink veining of the alabaster ; and Hampden, where there is a monument to John Hampden, who Macau- lay said, "would have been, had he lived, the Washington of England." Both of these towns are near, and also, and not less interesting, is the timbered farm-house in Chorley Wood, where William Penn was married to his Guli- elma, in 1672. We could spend a week delight- fully visiting these interesting places and driv- ing about this beautiful region, with its many parks, and as an additional attraction, to one member of the party at least, Mr. Croft assures us there is excellent fishing in the Chess. It was quite late when we reached Burnham 122 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE Beeches and the falling twilight added to the weird effect of their great boles and strangely gnarled and twisted branches. Miss Cassandra suggested our stopping for tea at one of the many little cottage tea-gardens which are scattered through this woodland maze, remarking as she untied her bonnet- strings, that "emotions were wearing and sharpened the appetite." We did not realize how much ours had been sharpened by the long drive and constant sightseeing until some hot buttered toast and scones were set before us, with strawberry jam of a flavor only to be found in Great Britain. We again realized the wisdom of Miss Cas- sandra's suggestion when we reached Slough, as the London train was evidently waiting for us, they always seem to be waiting over here, and there was no time for tea or dinner or anything else before our rather late arrival in London. We left Mr. Croft standing upon the plat- form, apparently quite bewildered by the fee that Walter had put in his hand, which, what- ever it may have been, was not, I am sure, out of proportion to the amount of pleasure that he had given us. He recovered himself suffi- ciently to wish us a pleasant journey and a 123 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON speedy return to Slough, and I am quite sure that he meant it. We have just parted with our delightful com- panions. They have gone to Surrey to visit friends and we leave for Bowness this after- noon. We hope to meet again at Oxford in August, as Walter has an engagement then with one of his favorite University Extension lecturers. I had an hour in which to write this letter, while Walter went to the Savoy to look up an American friend. We afterwards went to Brown Shipley's and at Trafalgar Square, while we stood looking at the great lions on the Nelson monument, we noticed the police clearing the street, and everyone being pushed on to the sidewalk, as if awaiting a procession. We stopped and gazed with the crowd, and soon a carriage came along with two gentlemen in- side, and no outriders. It was the King and the Prince of Wales on their way to the sta- tion, the former en route to Marienbad to meet Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria and to take the cure. The King looks well and happy and apparently much less in need of a cure than the Prince, who is so slight and delicate and grows more and more like his cousin, the Czar. As Walter had telegraphed from Oxford to 124 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE have our letters held at Brown Shipley's we found quite a budget, enough to occupy and entertain us upon our journey northward. Among other letters was one giving the date of the children's sailing, and your charming letter from Assisi. I cannot say that I envy you, you dearest Margaret, as you deserve all the good things that the gods bestow; and then I am quite too happy to envy any one ; but I should love to see that dear little hill town again. I am rejoiced to hear you say that St. Francis and Santa Chiara are as real to you as upon your first visit, and that Allan has fallen under the spell of their enchantments. A letter from Angela was among the others. She is evidently bored by the monotony of the life at Carlsbad and says that she can well understand all about Madame de Stael and the Rue de Bac, for beautiful as Carlsbad is she finds it deadly dull and would prefer a third- class London hotel to the large and imposing one in which she is stopping, with a band play- ing at all hours of the day. "The mountain walks at Carlsbad," she says, "are romantic and lovely ; but they are filled with people walk- ing, and drinking at the various springs, and then walking again, and talking of their vari- ous maladies in between drinks, all of which 125 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON is not especially exciting, not to be compared with the delightful roving life that you and Walter are leading. Could you, would you allow me to join you, if I promise to be very good and give you no trouble? I shall prob- ably be able to find company as far as London, in the next week or ten days, and from there I can reach you wherever you are. 4 'Mamma and papa and Mrs. Coxe are so interested in their several cures that they will not miss me. Every two or three days they tell me, with the most triumphant expression, how many pounds they have lost. They really should be shadows by this time, but they do not appear at all emaciated and are still what I should call decidedly plump. I am beginning to think that the scales are arranged to suit the desired fatness or leanness of the patient, although since coming here we have not met one single person who wished to be fat. I fancy that the thin people go to some other cure where they are warranted to put on flesh as cleverly as they are supposed to take it off here. Mrs. Coxe and the parents would send love and messages if they were not all engaged in their various anti-fat diversions. "Now, really, dearest Z., I should not dream of intruding upon your solitude a deux, if you 126 A QUAKER PILGRIMAGE had not written of travelling in trios, quar- tettes, and even quintettes, with persons of vari- ous ages and denominations." How Miss Cassandra would dislike being spoken of as a "denomination"! We telegraphed at once to Angela to say how glad we should be to have her with us and the sooner the better. It will seem like old times, like Koman days and days in Venice and at the Villa d'Este, to have the child travel with us again. VI WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED " OLD ENGLAND," BOWNESS, July 26th. WE came to this most lovely spot last night, dearest Margaret, and are revelling in the com- fort of a good inn as well as in the beauty of our surroundings. The house is built so near the water's edge that the drawing-room, in whose great bay window I am writing, seems to reach out into Lake Windermere. It is so pleasant to be settled down for a few days after knocking about, from pillar to post, that we are taking life very quietly and not making any excursions to-day, although several coaching parties started from here this morning. As we set out for a stroll around the little town of Bowness, the church, another St. Mar- tin's and quite ancient, dating back to 1485, drew us irresistibly, and we were rewarded for our "early piety," as Walter is pleased to call it, by finding some interesting old stained 128 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED glass which, has been carefully restored, some shockingly new frescoes, and a number of very quaint epitaphs. One of them, over the grave of a slave, Rasselas Belfield, a native of Abyssinia, bears these grateful lines upon the tombstone : A Slave by birth I left my native Land, And found my Freedom on Britannia's Strand Blest Isle Thou Glory of the Wise and Free ! Thy Torch alone unbinds the chains of Slavery. This afternoon we made a tour of Lake Win- dermere, the winding lake, in and out among the lovely islands, near Belle Isle and on toward the north end of the lake where the mountains form a natural amphitheatre. Even if occa- sional showers forced us to take refuge in the cabin, the sun shone forth gaily between times, permitting us to have a glimpse of Mrs. Felicia Hemans's "Dove Nest," which is perched upon the eastern slope of Windermere. Christopher North's Elleray is also on this lake, and here he was working on his "Isle of Palms" when Shelley brought his child bride to Chestnut Hill, some miles beyond, near Keswick, where is still the "lovely orchard garden," smaller and less charming than when Shelley and his wife and Eliza Westbrook enjoyed there some fleeting hours of happiness, before this apostle 9 129 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON of atheism "descended upon Ireland with propagandist intent." It was at Briery, the home of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, near Windermere, that Mrs. Gaskell first met Charlotte Bronte and found her the lovely person that she described her, with her sweet voice, expressive dark eyes, and gentle hesitating manner of speaking. What the rich and varied beauty of this region was to the little authoress, after the bleak outlook of her own moors, we gather from her letters, and we do not wonder that she longed to drop out of the Briery carriage and " explore for herself these grand hills and sweet dales,'* of which she had "only seen the similitude in dreams, waking or sleeping." At Fox How, which we saw yesterday on our way hither, Miss Bronte was invited to drink tea with the Arnolds, and described it as a "nest half buried in flowers and creepers, the valley and hills around as beautiful as imagina- tion could dream." Walter says that I enjoy this visit of Char- lotte Bronte's to the Lakes as much as if I had been with her, and I really believe that I do. The thought of this brave little woman coming out of her lonely, desolate home, from which her two sisters had recently been taken, into all the 130 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED brightness and beauty of Ambleside and Gras- mere, and into the genial companionship of Mrs. Gaskell and the Arnolds, is quite enough to make one happy. AMBLESIDE, July 28th. Yesterday being a perfectly clear day with an air blowing like that of October at home, we made the excursion to Keswick, passing by Fox How and having a glimpse of Rydal Mount through the trees. As there are no relics of Wordsworth here, and as the place is not shown to visitors, none of the coaching party thought it worth while to descend from their perches to get a nearer view of the house ; and then we expect to walk over here some day and see all of these interesting places by ourselves and at our leisure Nab Cottage, Elleray, and all the rest. Do you remember Christopher North's " Foresters"? It must have been writ- ten at Elleray, as the descriptions of the Lake country are so perfect. I wish I could find a copy of it, but, like many another good book, I fancy it is out of print. Not far from Eydal Mount is the picturesque miniature lake, Eydal Water, whose silver bosom reflects its tiny islets and emerald shores. The long reeds that grow far out in the water fringe the lake with their slender shafts and 131 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON wave gayly in the breeze, a challenge to any Pan who may be haunting these woods and shores. Poets instead of river gods answered the lovely lake's challenge, and " beauty born of murmuring sound" entered into their souls, for from here and from Grasmere, where Coleridge and Southey often joined Words- worth in his walks, there issued some of the sweetest of our English lyrics. Overlooking Eydal "Water and under the shade of a friendly tree is " Wordsworth's Seat," a huge boulder with hospitably shelving sides. Here we may fancy the poet sitting by the hour drawing inspiration from the beauty of the lake and the picturesque grandeur of Loughrigg rising above it. We passed by Grasmere 's fair lake and vale and on to Helm Crag, at whose top a stone wall defines the boundary between Westmore- land and Cumberland, and a heap of stones marks the grave of Dunmail, the last of the Kings of Cumbria. A little way beyond is Thirlmere with Helvellyn towering to a height of over three thousand feet, a vast altitude for England! Here we had a superb view of this great mountain's jagged peaks, and of the Red Cove Crag from which poor Charles Gough fell to his death while climbing these hills. 132 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED When Sir Walter Scott came here, he was so deeply impressed by the story of the finding of ^oung Gough's body, months afterwards, his faithful little terrier with her litter of young puppies beside her master, that he wrote a poem on the spot. It was said, by some of the dale folk, that the little watcher had "eat grass," but others thought that she had lived upon the carrion mutton that is always to be found among these fellside precipices and in the moun- tain ghylls. In any case, it was proved to everyone's satisfaction that she did not eat her dead master. Although we were greatly touched by this story of canine faithfulness, we were not moved to poetry like Walter Scott or Thomas Wilkinson. The latter 's description of the little dog's remarkable three months' vigil is simpler and better, to my thinking, than Sir Walter Scott's: "And when the rosy dawn On SwirrePs rocks and Striden's horrors shone, To her dead lord the faithful servant crept, Pull'd his damp robe, and wondered why he slept." "We passed by the Castle Rock of St. John, the scene of Scott's Bridal of Triermain, and so on to Castle Rigg, from whose brow a noble panorama of the vale of Keswick is to be had, with Derwentwater and Brassenthwaite shining 133 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON below, and Skiddaw and Blacathara towering above them. It did not seem worth while to go out of our way to see "how the waters came down at Lodore," because we were told that very little water was coming down at present. Instead, we went to Greta Hall, Southey's home for forty years, and then out to see the Druid Circle, or whatever it may be, with its thirty- eight stones, some of them quite high. From this eminence, and across Naddle Fell, is the little church of St. John in the Vale, said to be the highest site of any church in England. The churchyard is reverently and pathetically dedi- cated "To the glory of God and the last long sleep of the Dalesmen." Our day of coaching was altogether delight- ful, but we came back to the shores of Winder- mere as to a home, and feel that we can say of this vale, with the poet who wrote of it so tenderly : " Dear valley, having in thy face a smile, Though peaceful, full of gladness." We have moved over to Ambleside in order to be within walking distance of the Words- worth haunts, and as if to be quite in keeping with the associations of the place we are lodged 134 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED in the cottage of a Mrs. Dove. The White Lion was "full up," but the landlady secured us rooms in her mother's house near by. We go over to the inn for our dinners, and take our luncheons and teas wherever we happen to be. I have been trying to get you a photograph of this tiny cottage, set about with nasturtiums, marigolds, and all sorts of old-fashioned flow- ers, but you know that I have never been much of a success as a photographer. July 29th. This afternoon we started a full hour before the coach, that was to pick us up on the road, and walked all around the little village of Am- bleside, by Harriet Martineau's cottage, the Knoll, which is covered over with vines and has a pretty garden beside it. Here it was that she entertained Charlotte Bronte upon her second visit to the lakes. The two literary ladies seem to have spent a week or more together in great peace and happiness, writing in their separate rooms during the morning and meeting in the afternoons and evenings for walks and talks. A perfectly ideal way of making a visit, is it not ? These English people, probably from long practice, have elevated the giving and receiving of visits to a fine art ; we might learn much from 135 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON them ! In a letter written from the Knoll, Miss Bronte says that "although Miss Martineau was not without her peculiarities, her good and noble qualities far outweighed her defects." They were at one in their enthusiastic admira- tion for the Duke of Wellington and upon many other subjects; but the hostess with all her "ab- solutism" failed to convert the resolute little Yorkshire lady to her own ardent faith in mes- merism. A little further along the stage road, at the foot of Nab Scar, is Nab Cottage, a long, low vine-covered building with a porch in front. Here De Quincey lived for some years, and here Hartley Coleridge, the "Li'le Hartley" beloved of the lake folk, lived and died. The feeling about Hartley Coleridge is curi- ously strong among the simple country people. "When Dean Eawnsley asked whether Mr. Wordsworth and Hartley were not great friends, the answer was very much in the lat- ter 's favor. "He [Mr. Wordsworth] was a cleverish man, but he wasn't set much count of by noan of us. He lent Hartley a deal of his books, it 's certain, but Hartley helped him a great deal, I understand, did best part of his poems for him, so the savin' is. Na na, I doan't think Li'le Hartley ever set much by him, never was friendly, I doubt. Ye see, he [Mr. Words- 136 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED worth] was so hard upon him, so very hard upon him, giv' him so much hard preaachin' about his waays." Wordsworth and his poetry were doubtless both quite beyond the under- standing of the dalesmen, not for ' ' sich as us, ' ' as they expressed it, "noan o' us very fond on 'im; eh, dear! quite a different man from Li'le Hartley. He wasn't a man as was very com- panionable, ye kna." One practical mark the poet has left upon the vale, which the country folk seem to ap- preciate. He had his own fancy about chim- neys. As one of the cottagers said, "Wuds- worth liked a bit of colour in them. I 'member he and the Doctor [Arnold] had great argu- ments about the chimleys time we was building Fox How, and Wudsworth sed he liked a bit o' colour in 'em. And that the chimley coigns sud be natural headed and natural bedded, a little red and a little yaller. For there is a bit of colour in the quarry stone up Easedale way." And so many of the chimney stacks up Rydal way are built according to the poet's fancy, and a charming fancy it was! I have never realized how much beauty there can be in chimney stacks until this summer when I have seen so much of rural England. The chimneys are picturesque as well as 137 everything else about Dove Cottage, but how tiny it is ! The master must have had to bend his tall head to enter his own doorway. In 1807 De Quincey visited the cottage, which was originally an inn with the sign of "The Dove and Olive Bough." His description of "the little white cottage gleaming among trees" is not untrue to its appearance to-day. Here is the same diamond-paned window looking out on the road and all embowered with roses and jasmine. This window belonged to Dorothy's ground-floor chamber, where are still the ar- ticles of furniture used by her and brought from Eydal Mount after Mrs. Wordsworth's death. On the floor above is the bedroom of the master and mistress, the little parlor consecrated as the poet's study by its three hundred volumes, and beyond it the tiny guest-chamber, added just before Sir Walter and Lady Scott visited the Wordsworths in 1805. "I was," wrote De Quincey after his first visit to Dove Cottage, which was destined to be his own home for many years, "ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the hall below." 138 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED Standing in that little parlor we thought of all the goodly company that had been gathered there, for although Carlyle found Words- worth's talk thin and prolix and decidedly not to his taste, the master of Dove Cottage drew to his humble home many of the great folk of his time. Here came Christopher North, whose eye, Miss Martineau said, could "almost see through a stone wall," and so beheld beauty in everything, and Sir Walter; and Robert Southey across the hills from Greta Hall, Kes- wick, and Samuel Rogers, Humphry Davy, Thomas Clarkson, the friend of the African slave, and Charles Lamb. The latter was be- guiled in 1802 from the courts and nooks of Thames Street, the never-failing delights of Fleet Street, the old book-stalls, familiar street cries at noon and at midnight, dear to his cockney heart, to behold for once and to be stirred to the depths of his soul by the glories of Helvellyn and Skiddaw. If the walls of that room could speak what eloquence and genial converse, subtle humor and flashing wit they would relate! Coleridge, who, as Lamb said, talked like an angel, was a daily visitor at the cottage and quite ready to prolong his angelic converse until three o'clock in the morning if Dorothy and William would but listen. 139 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Only second in interest to the parlor is Dorothy's Bower, the little terraced gar- den, which lies so much higher than the house that the second-story rooms open into it. The vines that grow so luxuriantly to-day were planted by the poet's own hands, as were the apple-trees upon the crest of the hill that still shade Wordsworth's out-of-door study. Upon the rustic bench under the trees he often sat absorbed in thought, with the lovely panorama of rugged hills and smiling valleys spread be- fore him, and here he entertained his brother poets who made his home their rallying-place. Beneath the little bower is the well where the brother and sister planted the large-leaved primroses and here the hidden rill still sings, as of yore, " If you listen, all is still, Save a little neighboring rill, That from out the rocky ground Strikes a solitary sound." In this happy garden, " whose seclusion deep Hath been friendly to industrious hours," and while taking long walks around Grasmere Lake and Rydal Water, or while seated upon the great roadside boulder that bears his name, 140 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED there came to the poet his highest inspirations, winged fancies and thoughts sublime flashed " upon that inner eye Which is the bliss of solitude." Indeed, Wordsworth has told us himself that nine- tenths of his verses "were murmured out in the open air." To this little, low cottage, built upon a hill side, Wordsworth brought home his fair bride, Mary Hutchinson, who had been his school mate at Penrith, and here the young wife and dearly loved sister lived together in harmony and happiness almost paradisiacal. The caretaker assured us that the small dark kitchen shadowed by the terrace is much as it was when these two well-born and highly-cul- tivated women performed all the work of the household with their own hands. She remem- bers well seeing them about their daily tasks, when she came to the house as a child. Of the tall old gentleman in his long blue cloak, who walked about the hills and vales muttering to himself she and her young companions were half afraid. An old woman now, she was a girl when the Wordsworths lived at Dove Cottage, and as she showed us the grates and fireplaces she told us that they are just as the family had 141 left them, and that the poet used to toast his bread before the " Half kitchen and half parlour fire." It is impossible to read a page of Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere journal without being impressed by the pastoral simplicity of life and the "high thinking" that reigned in Dove Cot- tage in those days: "Monday. Sauntered a good deal in the garden, bound carpets, mended old clothes, read ' Timon of Athens,' dried linen. ... In the morning William cut down the win- ter cherry-tree. I sowed French beans and weeded. . . . Coleridge read l Christabel ' a second time ; we had increas- ing pleasure. William and I were employed all the morn- ing in writing an addition to the Preface. ... A sweet evening, as it has been a sweet day, and I walked along the side of Rydal Lake with quiet thoughts. The hills and lake were still. The owls had not begun to hoot, and the little birds had given over singing. I looked before me and saw a red light upon Silver How, as if coming out of the vale below, " ' There was a light of most strange birth, A light that came out of the earth, And spread along the dark hill-side.' " If William chopped wood for the kitchen fire and Dorothy mended old clothes and sowed French beans, they truly "walked among the stars" when they had finished their homely tasks or while engaged upon them. That the Wordsworths were able to sustain thinking of 142 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED any kind, high or low, on the combined sum of the incomes of the three inmates of Dove Cot- tage was largely due to the exertions of the two capable women who baked, brewed, washed, and stitched in the little kitchen under the hill. Nor was this all. When the daily tasks were done the wife and sister still had mind and spirit to enjoy the last poem or essay from the pens of Coleridge, Southey, Sir Walter, or De Quincey, or to listen, with keen appreciation, to the latest composition of the master of the household, who depended upon his womenfolk for literary companionship as well as for the material comforts of life. In fine weather there were congenial spirits to drop in and discuss poetry and prose with the young writer; but in the long seasons of rainy weather that come often to this Lake Country, and in the short days of winter, when the evenings are long, it was to Dorothy and Mary that Wordsworth turned for the sympathy and encouragement that every poet's soul craves. Both Coleridge and De Quincey have left pleasant descriptions of Wordsworth's "ex- quisite sister." To the sensitive and im- pressionable Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth evidently stood first among womankind, and she seems to have given him a place in her 143 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON heart close to that held by William. * 'Her man- ners are simple, ardent, impressive," wrote Coleridge; "her eye watchful in minutest obser- vations of Nature; and her taste a perfect electrometer. ' ' De Quincey speaks of Miss Wordsworth as "shorter and slighter than her sister-in-law, her face of an Egyptian brown rarely met with in women of English birth." Although admir- ing greatly the remarkable endowments of the poet's sister and her exquisite sympathy with nature, he discovered in Mrs. Wordsworth a greater refinement of manner, an ease and re- pose, that would have caused her to be pro- nounced "very much the more ladylike person." Very quiet was Mrs. Wordsworth despite her "radiant graciousness," entering so little into the general conversation around her, that Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson used to allege against her that she could only say "God bless you!" Despite the sweetness and sunny benignity that De Quincey found in Mrs. Wordsworth's countenance, the country people, some of whom still remember her, speak of her face as "nob- but a plaainish an." When interrogated as to Wordsworth's appearance, an old retainer re- plied, ' ' He was an ugly-f aaced man and a mean liver"! Of the poet, another old lake country- 144 WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED man said, "Mr. Wordsworth went bunning and booming about and she [Dorothy] kept close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let 'em fall and tak' 'em down and put 'em on paper for him. And you med' be very well sure as how she didn't understand nor make sense out of 'em, and I doubt that he [Words- worth] didn't knaw much aboot them either himself, but howiver there 's a gay lock o' fowk as wad I dar' say." It was while living at Dove Cottage in the early years, when " every common sight" wore ' ' the glory and the freshness of a dream, ' ' that Wordsworth wrote "The Ode," "The White Doe of Eylstone," "The Excursion," and "The Daffodils." The coach overtook us at Dove Cottage, where we had tarried long, and while the other members of the party filled, quite filled, the tiny abode with themselves and their raptures, we started over to the Church of St. Oswald, which is so near the cottage that its sad associ- ations with recent sorrows drove Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth from their Grasmere home, in 1813, to Rydal Mount. In a shaded corner of the old churchyard, by Botha's wave, are the graves of Wordsworth and his Mary. By the side of their tombstone, 10 145 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON which bears the simplest possible inscription, is that of the poet's favorite child, Dora, Mrs. Quillinan, and of her husband, Edward Quil- linan. Not far from the grave of William Wordsworth is that of Hartley Coleridge. The last resting-place of this brilliant but unequally developed genius is marked by a Celtic cross, and a little farther to the right in this Poet's Corner of the Lake District is a tablet to the memory of Arthur Hugh Clough and to his sister, Anne Clough, sometime Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Although Clough died at Florence and is buried in the Swiss cemetery there, as you know, this tablet to his memory is placed over the grave of his mother, who died at Eller How, Ambleside. As we turned away from the little church- yard so filled with tender memories, Walter reminded me of Miss Cassandra's wise saw about emotions being exhausting and requiring material support, and directed by an old dales- man we made our way to an inn near by, where upon a lawn of green velvet a dainty tea was being served to some of our party. "We shall never have another such after- noon!" I exclaimed. "No, not until we visit the shrine of some other poet ; and now, Zelphine, if you will come 14* WHERE POETS LIVED AND LOVED back to the things of this lower world, this tea and these scones are fit for gods and men. ' ' "And better still for all tired travellers," said one of our party, an English lady who was sitting at a small table near us, adding that she was "going quite seedy" but tea and cake had picked her up famously. July Slat. We left our own especial Dove Cottage this morning, at quite an early hour, and climbed the steep mountain road to the top of the Kirk- stone Pass. I say climbed with some emphasis, as we were politely requested to get down from the coach and walk up the long hill to a little house called the Travellers' Best, an inn where untempting refreshments are sold, and some highly-colored post-cards which give but a poor idea of the rugged beauty of the pass, especially as we saw the hills and the Kirk stone, which gives the place its name, with the morning mist curling from off their sides just as Wordsworth wrote of them. Hundreds of sheep were grazing on the short grass of the hill sides where rude stone fences define neighborhood landmarks. The Travellers' Rest, situated at a height of about 1500 feet, is said to be the highest inhab- ited house in England, but a statistical English- man upon the coach informed us that this was 147 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON not so, as the Cat and Fiddle Inn not far from Buxton, which stands at an altitude of 1700 feet, is entitled to this distinction. Ullswater is as beautiful as Windermere and more ruggedly picturesque than Grasmere; but it lacks their compelling charm, to our thinking, being less thickly set about with associations of the poets that we love. And yet we do not forget that it was here, at Gowbarrow Park on Ullswater 's shore, that Wordsworth's daffodils danced in the spring sunshine. If we were in daffodil season, I am quite sure that we should have seen the gay blossoms " dancing in the breeze," as we strolled through the Park this afternoon, just as they appeared to Dorothy Wordsworth's sympathetic eye when she beheld them, on a spring morning, tossing and reeling and dancing, seeming ' ' as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew over the lake, they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing." We shall quit these lovely valleys with regret, to journey into the busy world again, feeling that we are leaving behind us a sacred spot, a shrine shut in by rugged hills, mirrored in clear lakes, consecrated by the lives and sacrifices, the high thoughts and aspirations, and the noble and gracious fulfilments of some of the wisest and best of the children of men. 148 VII ROMAN ENGLAND CHESTEB, August 1st. WHEN we reached Liverpool this morning we found the whole city en fete, with flags flying from all the buildings. As the papers had an- nounced, the King and Queen are here to lay the cornerstone of the new cathedral, which is to be the largest in all England. It is to cover an area of ninety thousand square feet. Is it not difficult to stretch one's mind to take in the dimensions of a building so vast in length and breadth, with a nave one hundred and sixteen feet high? The streets were gay with decorations of all kinds, long festoons of pink, white, and red roses, the arms and crown on red plush in gold embroidery, and more flags, streamers, and bunting than are to be seen even at our own celebrations. We were pleased to see some Stars and Stripes flying among the English flags. There were a number of elaborate designs, wreaths, and transparencies bearing words of 149 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON welcome to the King and Queen, most frequent among them being such inscriptions as: "God Bless our King and Queen," "God Bless King Edward, the Peacemaker." The English people whom we meet say that King Edward's reputation as a peacemaker is well deserved. It is interesting and significant that the rulers of the two great English-speak- ing nations, our President and England's King, should stand forth so prominently as aiders and abettors of the world's peace. Unlike Mr. Howells, royalty seems "to come our way." We saw the King in London and here he is again, his face meeting us like that of an old friend, and a very pleasant, genial face it is ! He could not have been on his way to Germany, as we were told. With no idea of being able to see anything of the ceremonies at the cathedral grounds, we secured a carriage simply for the pleasure of driving through the gayly-decorated city and viewing the immense concourse of people. As we were stopping in one of the smaller streets, waiting for the crowd to disperse, we heard sounds of cheering, then came the outriders, and then the King and Queen. As they were in a high-seated open carriage, we had a good view of them, looking for all the world as I 150 ROMAN ENGLAND have always thought of Kings and Queens in my childhood, driving in a grand coach amid gala scenes, all as it should have been except for the crowns. We wished so much for Chris- tine and Lisa, but then they would have been sadly disappointed about the crowns. The King was in his red British uniform with a long white feather in his military cap, and saluted the enthusiastic populace in soldier fashion as he passed. The Queen is just like her pictures, quite lovely and astonishingly young looking, as we saw her from our coign of vantage. They tell us that her complexion owes much to art, but no art that has yet been discovered could give her her handsome eyes, which constitute her greatest and most lasting beauty. But, after all, it is not the Queen's beauty as much as a certain indescribable com- bination of dignity and graciousness that makes her so attractive. Walter lost his heart to her at once, as all the men do, I fancy, she is so exquisitely and charmingly feminine. It some- times seems as if this quality were becoming more rare as the world moves on; and laugh at us, as men have done for centuries, because of certain distinctly feminine attributes, they like us all the better for them, even enjoying, in a way, our fondness for pretty nothings, 151 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON chiffons, and the like. The Queen is purely, feminine in her love for chiffons, but she never leads or follows in any extreme of fashion, especially in hats. Instead of the immense, ex- aggerated structures they are beginning to wear over here, she had on a quite simple little toque of a delicate mauve, the same shade as her gown, all in exquisite taste. Some English ladies whom we met in the drawing-room at Blossom's this evening were talking of the King and Queen as they love to do, with a pleasant underlying sense of ownership. In speaking of the Queen's beauty and youth- ful appearance, despite the sorrows and trials of her life, of which latter they made no secret, they said that although lovely she was not a particularly clever woman and rather lacking in a sense of humor, while King Edward is immensely clever and keenly alive to the humor- ous side of life. The Princess Charles of Den- mark is clever, they agreed, like her father, who is devoted to her as he is fond of clever people, but, they added, shaking their wise heads, "the Queen is a good woman and has the heart of the whole English people." We appreciated our privileges in being ad- mitted to these confidences; and hearing the 152 ROMAN ENGLAND dicta of the good dames given forth thus ex cathedra, as one may express it, we felt that valuable side lights had been thrown upon the private life of the royal family of England. Even if I had known better I should not have thought of differing from these worthy ladies, who were as firmly established in their opin- ions about their own royalties as in their loyal devotion to the ritual and observances of the Church of England. "It must require generations of life under a monarchy to bring about such a condition of mind," exclaimed Walter, after the ladies had withdrawn. "With the very strictest ideals of life and duty, these typical British matrons ad- mit to themselves, in a sub rosa fashion, that the King has failings which would be serious defects in another person and yet, with all his faults, they love him still because he is the King. This English point of view would be quite impossible to the average American. If our President, any of our presidents, should fail to do the square thing by his wife, wouldn't we'execrate him? But this feeling of the sacred- ness of majesty, having survived the reigns of Charles II and George IV, may prevail for another hundred years or so." From all of which you will perceive that Walter has not 153 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON become an anglomaniac. I must confess that I watched him with some uneasiness during the conversation with the dowagers, fearing that his uncompromising Americanism, which amounts to a religion, might lead him to ' ' bear testimony" in a manner that would have sur- prised his listeners. You must know that the King and Queen hav- ing left Liverpool this afternoon, and there being no possibility of the Haverford getting in for another twenty-four hours, we have come to dear old Chester for the night. Before we left Liverpool we had a couple of hours in the Walker Gallery, where we had the pleasure of seeing Dante's Dream in color and in what richness of color ! I felt very much as you and I did when we first entered the Salle Carre at the Louvre, before the new chronological ar- rangement prevailed, when so many friends of long standing appeared to us for the first time in color, almost in the flesh as it seemed to us, the laughing Le Bruns, the wonderful Raphaels, Da Vincis, and all the rest. In the Walker Gallery, besides the pre-Eaphaelites are some Italian, Flemish, and German paintings, a fine collection, that like many other things in Liver- pool is overlooked because this city is a landing place and most people after a long voyage are 154 ROMAN ENGLAND tired of inactivity and wish to spread their wings and fly away somewhere, anywhere. There really is a great deal to see in Liverpool and Walter found the city docks, which with those of Birkenhead extend for six or seven miles along the Mersey, well worth more than the hour which he had to give them. The city itself is of a prevailing grayness of hue, and with all the immense amount of shipping that is done here, in no place that we have seen in England, is the poverty so evident. The white, pinched faces of the children and the hopeless faces of the old people quite haunt us. Here is the poverty of Italy, without its sunshine, its flowers, and its picturesqueness. I found Wal- ter dispensing pennies and sixpences among the children so liberally that we should have been followed by a mob had it not been for the superior attractions of royalty. We enjoyed a walk on the old walls of Ches- ter in the long twilight this evening, and what wonderful walls they are, surrounding the city in a circuit of nearly two miles! Even if not actually old Koman walls, they follow the orig- inal lines and beneath them were fought battles, early and late, from the seventh century down to the time of the Civil War. Walter was de- lighted to find some Eoman antiquities in the 155 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Water Tower. You remember it, I am sure. It is the picturesque ivy-grown tower, with a statue of Queen Anne at the head of the steps which lead into the garden. Walter's interest in Roman antiquities is unflagging and adds so much zest to our trip. We have come across an English magazine here at Blossom's which gives us an interesting account of some recent excavations. The archaeologists enjoyed "a feast of fat things" at Silchester, where they not only found beautiful mosaic floors and other interesting remains but a complete apparatus for heating a house by means of hot-air pipes, a luxury by no means usual in the England of to-day. We must go to Silchester sometime; indeed, we are already planning another so- journ in Great Britain, this one to include Ire- land and Scotland and to be devoted exclusively to antiquities. You and Allan will surely join this archasological expedition, and how we shall all enjoy it ! Is there any limit to the interest- ing things to be done under this shining sun I or, rather, under this pouring English rain, which finally drove us in from the walls to the informing conversation of the dowagers. Wal- ter has never had just such a trip as this. In his hurried visits to England he has been with men who had no taste for the things he has 156 ROMAN ENGLAND cared for, and when he was here with Christine she was only interested in the large cities and in the shops. I do hope that the children may share their father's tastes. I am so anxious to see the darlings, and so glad that their gov- erness goes to Ireland to visit relatives, so that we may have them quite to ourselves. We had a good view of the outside of the Cathedral from the city walls this evening. I have always admired its great flying buttresses and Tudor porch. Its curiously mixed archi- tecture does not seem incongruous, and although Chester Cathedral may not be compared with the great cathedrals that we have seen, it has its own charm, especially as one sees it from the wall, its picturesque graveyard all overgrown with trees and shrubbery. We are planning to have an hour for the interior to-morrow, as there is an interesting old Norman doorway, and a fragment of the Norman church restored as a baptistery, that we want to see, and some beautiful carvings on the stalls and a famous wall-pulpit that I remember well. Above all, we must see the two flags that figured at Bun- ker Hill; they were not taken from us like the cannon. Miss Cassandra should be here to see them. I wonder where she and Lydia are, and whether we shall meet them later on in Oxford. 157 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON I have written Angela telling her of our plans. She will probably join us in York. ST. MARY'S, BOOTHAH, YORK, August .2nd. We came directly from Liverpool to York, a run of only a few hours. Our plan was to stop over at Manchester for half a day, as Walter wished to have a look at that great manufacturing centre, and I have always wanted to see the Maddox Brown frescoes in the Town Hall, but the children were tired and looked as if they needed the high bracing air which we find here. They are a bit pale, espe- cially Christine, and although they have a good nursery governess and have not lacked care they have a rather pathetic look, something quite indescribable. You will be laughing at me when. I say that they have a motherless look, both dressed alike, in orphan-asylum fashion, which is something I cannot abide. They adore their father and must have missed him sadly. Lisa is a. round chubby thing and although ten years old has been so much petted that she still has some charming baby ways. Christine is two years older, graver and more reserved, but very sweet and so pretty with her gray eyes and waving brown hair. They are both rather shy with me and painfully 158 DOORWAY OF TUDOR MANOR HOUSE, YORK ROMAN ENGLAND polite. Lisa will, I am sure, soon adopt me; Christine will not yield so quickly, but her father assures me that when won her friend- ship will be worth having. And is not this a pleasant way to make the acquaintance of my new Kinder? We are comfortably situated in a pleasant house kept by two English ladies quite near the Bootham Bar. Monk Bar has higher towers and Micklegate is more perfect archi- tecturally, but old Bootham always delights us with its Norman arch and ancient portcullis but alas ! like so many interesting buildings, it is disfigured with unsightly advertisements. Americans are not the only people to offend in this respect, but I regret to say that some of the wares advertised are of American manufacture. You may remember that there is a fine view of York Minster from the walls near Bootham Bar, and nearly opposite is the beautiful old Tudor Manor House, that you and I thought one of the most charming buildings in this city of York which so abounds in treasures of archi- tecture. The Manor House is now used as an institution for the blind. We went through it this afternoon and bought some of the ar- ticles made by the inmates, and Walter is now 159 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON congratulating himself upon having secured a clothes-brush which he reluctantly admits is of a quality and excellence beyond anything the United States can produce. They do make some things better over here, and yet when we went to the chemist's to get a tonic for Chris- tine, the array of home products that the sales- man set before us was really amusing; malted milk, liquid peptonoids, acid phosphates, etc., etc., until we were ready to lift up our hands and cry ''Enough!'* When we' asked whether they did not make any of these preparations in England, the man said, quite frankly, that they put them up so well in the States that it was not worth while. It really seems that the boasted strength of Great Britain is somewhat dependent upon the resources of our Greater Britain on the other side of the water. Does that have a "spread eagle" sound to you, Mar- garet, who are living among associations that so far antedate America, Columbus, and even Julius CaBsar? If it does, blame it upon Wal- ter's inveterate Americanism; and then, even here, we are by no means living entirely in the present. So much of the ancient York has been excavated within a few years, that we are re- minded of Eoman England at every turn. We are not planning to take the Kinder upon 160 ROMAN ENGLAND any extended tours of sightseeing, which would be wearisomeness to both flesh and spirit, but after walking around the walls this morning and viewing the Minster from without, we brought them around by the beautiful west front and entered the nave by the south door. Chris- tine was awed into silence by the vastness and lofty upreach of the glorious interior, and held fast to her father's hand, while Lisa wanted to know all about it. You see how different they are, but no intelligent child can fail to carry away some lasting impression of the indescrib- able combination of strength and grace that make this Lady of the North one of the glories of England. York was my second cathedral, Durham was the first, and with all my admira- tion for that vast pile of dark stone, which seems a part of the rocky bank of the Wear on which it stands, York Minster has always been the Cathedral of my dreams. To see it again and with Walter is an unspeakable joy. Few visitors were in the Cathedral this morning and we enjoyed undisturbed the vast nave with its clustered pillars, upon which the light streamed, red, gold, and pale green through the many windows of old glass. You remember the organ screen, with its representations of the English Kings from William I to Henry 11 161 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON VI, and above them the dear little angels play- ing upon musical instruments. This screen delighted the children even more than the "Five Sisters" in the north transept, which is one of the most beautiful windows, with its five lancet lights and delicate tracery in soft greens and browns. The Jesse window in the clere-story in the north aisle is rich and lovely, with the stem of Jesse winding like a vine through the more formal design, and the whole representing the genealogy of our Lord. The verger told us that the east window is the sec- ond largest in the world and was saved, almost miraculously, when the Cathedral was set fire to in 1829. No one but a fanatic, or a mad man, could have been guilty of such an act of van- dalism and such the incendiary, Jonathan Mar- tin, proved to be at his trial, as he confessed quite ingenuously: "I wur vexed at hearing them sing, the organ made such a buzzing noise, I thought thou shalt buzz no more I '11 have thee down to-night after service. ' ' Which he did forthwith, setting fire to the choir and destroying the beautiful screen, roof, and stalls, of which all of those now standing are reproductions. "We stopped to look at some of the old tat- tered flags and pennons, borne in many battles 162 ROMAN ENGLAND from the days when York and Lancaster strove for England's crown until the war in South Africa, which seems so near. There is some- thing infinitely pathetic about the hanging of these old battle-flags in the cathedrals, and something of the dramatic that seems to belong to the French more than to the English. I like it, much as I abhor war, because it elevates the only thing that excuses war, patriotism, to its rightful place in the temple of religion. The triumphs of peace are celebrated, too, in stone and marble, here as in many another cathedral. The Lady chapel with its noble monument to Archbishop Sharpe and the beautiful eight- sided Chapter house which is, I believe, the handsomest in England, we hope to see many times, as we are near enough to the Minster to stop in as we go to and fro. Some associations with Haworth, we came upon quite unexpectedly. When there we had seen the school where many Yorkshire chorist- ers are trained. It appears that when the last great musical festival was held at York, in 1835, a grand occasion, the Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, being present, the Yorkshire choristers were placed behind those from London. This did not at all suit the ideas of the Yorkshire leader, Mr. Tom 163 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Parker of Haworth, and on the first day, after the London chorus had displayed its powers, Mr. Parker turned to his comrades, and said: "Nah, lads, let 's oppen wer shoolders!" The Yorkshire chorus burst forth and created such an impression that they were afterwards put in front. "That 's nowt to what we can do," said Parker to the astonished Londoners. August 3rd. Although York is a large city and a great thoroughfare between the north and south, boasting a railroad station which its citizens rank almost next in importance to the Minster, it is still strangely dominated by the past, and the impression that York makes upon the trav- eller to-day is that of an ancient fortress. Whether fortified by the Romans, or by the Britons themselves, it was always against the encroachments of the Northmen, Picts, Scots, and Danes that this city upon the Ouse was to be defended. With its own strong walls, Hadrian's great wall, and as an additional protection a second wall and a long line of forts, it seemed that the Roman in York might take his ease and follow the instincts of his beauty-loving nature, which he did in making of this military centre an "Altera Roma," as 164 ROMAN ENGLAND he sometimes called it. Only bits of tlie fine old buildings, here and there, are still to be seen, carved capitals, fragments of decoration; and in the garden of the Philosophical Society, by the shining river upon which the swans float majestically, there is a many-angled tower which formed a corner of the old Roman wall. Beautiful buildings were erected here and luxuries, known only to the life of the south, were brought to uncivilized Britain. At Aid- borough, fifteen miles or so from York, the Romans dotted the plains with their villas. A young Scotchman, Dr. Mclvor, who sits near us at table, tells us that the museum of Roman antiquities at Aldborough is well worth a visit. Walter suggests a motor trip there and we are looking forward to it with great pleasure. This was the Isurium of the Romans, as you two Italy lovers may be glad to know. I have never before entered into the heart of this Roman England, probably because the intimate personal side of the Roman occupa- tion has never been dwelt upon in our histories. As Mr. Norway says in his interesting book upon Yorkshire, which we have been reading, "To many of us in these days the Roman oc- cupation of these islands is a sort of fairy tale, the story of some temporary raid, some huge 165 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON adventurous army which came and went, leav- ing about as much memory of its presence as the shadow of a summer cloud upon the earth. It is strange that we English, of all people, should think lightly of an occupation which was so like our own great task in India. . . . Do we ever think that this strange Koman occupation of our land lasted longer than our own stay in India has been as yet? The sixth Roman legion, that one which, with a regimental pride worthy of our sympathy, wrote itself on every one of its inscriptions 'Leg. vi. Victrix,' was in garrison at York for full three hundred years. Think of it ; as long a period as from the days of Queen Elizabeth unto our own!" And do you realize, Mar- garet, that the Eomans were in Britain as long, or longer, than the Briton has been in Amer- ica? I had not, nor did I remember that the Emperor Septimius Severus had died and been buried here, or that Constantine the Great was proclaimed Emperor in York. Walter declares that these facts make him feel at home in York, as Severus and Constantine are so intimately associated with his school days and are so much better company than our uncivilized British ancestors. And yet, after hearing about the recent pageant at Bury St. Edmunds 166 ROMAN ENGLAND from some people in the house, we feel that we have been brought into closer relations with the ancient Britons, especially with Queen Boadicea. This royal and heroic lady, they describe as large and blonde, a superb-looking creature, a very queen of tragedy. Of the pageant as a whole our informants did not give us a very clear idea, for after all a spectacular performance is something to be seen rather than to be described. If we had not been so much occupied in get- ting our trousseaux and being married, we might have seen one of the pageants at Bom- sey or at Bury St. Edmunds or at Oxford, where the scenes seem to have been particu- larly well arranged. Of course, a wedding is a somewhat serious affair and requires con- sideration ; but we surely could have spent less time upon our trousseaux in Paris. Indeed, I find my smart gowns so much in the way, in travelling, that I have packed them in a trunk by themselves and sent them off to the steamer. Dr. Mclvor went with us to the garden of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society this after- noon. Here are the ruins of St. Leonard's Hospital and of St. Mary's Abbey, that lovely ruin with its beautiful pointed arches and rich early English decoration. We walked all 167 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON around and about St. Mary's, as it covers quite a large area, and Dr. Mclvor, who is no Papist, but a blue Scotch Presbyterian, says that we can form no idea of the amount of good that was done among the sick and poor by these religious houses, in days when the only hos- pitals were those connected with monasteries and convents. He has been looking over the records of the Hospital and Abbey and was much impressed by the vast amount of prac- tical benevolence exercised by the good brothers. In the Hospitium, which was the guest hall of the Abbey, there are most interesting relics of the Eoman life in York, intimate personal effects like those at Pompeii, ornaments, rings, bracelets, armlets worn by the children; and, as if to bring that old life very close to that of our own day, a coil of hair worn by a Eoman lady, fastened by jet pins. This coil of hair was found in a leaden coffin which was enclosed within one of stone. Trinkets worn by proud Roman ladies were found in many of these stone coffins, placed there by the hands of those who loved them, and here are children's toys, whistles, and shells, which they gathered at the seashore just as children do to-day, and bits of glass and earthenware with which they 168 ROMAN ENGLAND played their games, hop-scotch, or whatever was the Roman equivalent for that sport. Downstairs in a lower room, are the inscrip- tions which the officers and soldiers of the legion had carved upon the tombs of their wives and children; for example, "To the Gods, to Manes, to a most innocent child, who lived but ten months, her father of the Sixth Legion Victorius inscribes this." These old inscriptions and despoiled tombs, " Obsolete lamps, whose light no time recalls, Urns without ashes, tearless lacrymals ! " seemed to throw a bridge across the ages and bring near to our sympathies those Roman fathers to whom wife and children were as dear as with us to-day, made dearer perhaps because of their exile from their own sunny land to this north country where the winds are cruel and the winters cold and long. No won- der that the luxurious Romans set about mak- ing their homes more comfortable, by heating them with hot-air pipes, in this curious climate where even when summer prevails out of doors winter still lingers inside of the houses ! Other people besides the Italians need to go out of doors to get warm, and what must these houses be like in winter? 169 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Dr. Mclvor says that the English keep them- selves warm with an "interlining of good beef and frequent libations of beer." How the Scotch keep warm he did not say, but Walter thinks that he knows, remembering the story that was told about Prince Louis of Batten- berg, who had to drink Scotch whisky to keep his knees warm when he wore the Highland costume. We should not have seen so many of the treasures of this museum in one afternoon had not our young Scotchman known just where to take us, and what would most interest us. He afterward showed us a bit of an ancient street, like the Appian Way at Some, or the street of tombs at Pompeii, from which many stone coffins have been excavated. Only per- sons of rank and wealth were buried in these stone coffins, of which we have seen such a number; the poorer classes and slaves were disposed of with much less ceremony. Of mo- saic pavements, statues, vases, and more usual relics, there is a vast collection. The air here is fine and bracing, we have had several beautifully clear days, and on the whole I feel disposed to recommend York as a good summer resort. We are well and happy, Lisa growing fat and rosier every day, all 170 ROMAN ENGLAND except Christine, who is not well and has de- veloped a troublesome sore throat which makes us feel quite anxious about her. If she is not decidedly better to-morrow I shall send for a doctor, as our landlady tells us there is an excellent " medical man" quite near. Dr. Mclvor, who for some reason is called ''Mr. Mclvor," looks so young that we feel it is wiser to have an M.D. of more experience. We always call him Doctor, because "there is no use getting into their queer ways, over here," as my ardent American expresses it, * ' and if we begin there is no knowing where we shall end." I do not myself anticipate any very serious ending even if we should happen to fall in with English ways, and am disposed when in Borne to do as the Romans do. Angela writes August 6th. It is Angela herself who is writing to you and from old England, dearest Margaret, strange as it may seem to you when you thought you had shipped her off to Austria for the rest of the summer. Z. dropped her pen in the middle of her letter and asks me to finish it. Why, I will tell you later, but you know that the only way that I can write is to 171 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON begin at the beginning, like the story books. In the first place I left Carlsbad a day earlier than I expected because the Browns were com- ing over to London and kindly offered to bring me with them. In this way I missed a letter from Z. and only realized, when I was nearing York, that I had not the most remote idea where she and Walter were stopping. I put my poor wits to work and decided to go to the post-office and get the Leonards' address there. You may remember, or you may not, that it is sometimes difficult to get an address at the post-office. I had forgotten the fact and was surprised when the man flatly refused to give it to me. I used my softest persuasions all to no purpose, and was on the point of turning away, feeling quite non-plussed, when suddenly a tall, sandy-haired young man, who was writ- ing at one of the desks, crossed the room, and with an apology for intruding, asked me if I were not the young lady whom Mr. and Mrs. Leonard were expecting the next day. After that, the man at the boxes would have given me anything I wanted and smiled and beamed upon me as I walked off with the lanky youth. He offered to take me to the house where the Leonards were stopping, which, he said, was not far, only a five minutes' walk if I did not 172 ROMAN ENGLAND mind that. Xo, I did not mind anything so long as I was on my way to Z. It never oc- curred to me, until we had gone some little distance, how perfectly ridiculous it was for me to be starting off with this stranger because he claimed to know the Leonards, but there was something in his face and bearing that in- spired confidence, and mine was not misplaced this time, as Z. greeted my escort as a friend, and thanked him warmly for bringing me to her, without even stopping to ask when, or how, we had met. As soon as we were alone, I asked Z. what in the world was the matter, she looked so pale, really ill, all her bright color gone and her eyes as heavy as if she had not slept for a week. "Has Walter been treating you very badly, Z. dear?" I asked. "Walter? oh, Angela! how can you? Wal- ter is a saint," and with this Z. dropped her head upon my shoulder and wept. "Well now, don't cry about it," I said in my most soothing tone. "I know that I should weep if I were married to a saint, but you and I have rather different ideas upon that sub- ject." Then Z. told me that Christine had been seriously ill and was still very weak, and that when they were most anxious about her their doctor had been obliged to go to London to 173 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON attend a medical congress and had left Dr. Mclvor, my post-office acquaintance, in charge of the case. Walter came in, in the midst of our confab, and assured me that Christine was much better, mending rapidly, and that Dr. Mclvor was taking good care of her, and that he, for his part, preferred him to the older "medical man." Walter evidently feels that Z. is unneces- sarily anxious about Christine; but it is tragic to have anyone ill in a strange land, and the M.D. does look young. Small wonder that he knew his way to the house so well, as he pays two or three visits a day! He has just set up for himself around the corner and is glad enough to get a patient, I fancy. I .give you the situation and will add a line in a day or two to tell you how we are progressing. August 8th. Christine has improved so rapidly in two days, as children are wont to do, that Z. has actually left her in my care and gone off with Walter for a day at Durham. She found out, when she was in London, that Mrs. Browning was born somewhere near Durham, and noth- ing will satisfy her but to see the place. I don't think she will ever find the house, and 174 ROMAN ENGLAND Walter realizes that it is a wild-goose chase; but he would cheerfully set out on a trip to the moon with Z., if the new balloons were in order for such an expedition, just for the sake of getting her away from Christine and into the open for a day. They have taken Lisa with them, as she is a good little traveller, and I am elevated to the dignity of head nurse. We really have an excellent trained nurse from the hospital ; but I am in charge and she treats me with great respect. Dr. Mclvor said yes- terday that Christine was well enough to sit up for an hour; but Z. demurred, said the doc- tor was young and daring, etc. She is more timid about taking risks than Walter ; but then she is so conscientious that she would always be more careful about other people's property than with her own. Do you remember the story of the colored woman who set fire to her shanty and burned her children up? When some per- son objected to such a proceeding a neighbor, another "colored lady," said, "Well, they were her own chillen, and she had a right to burn them up." Walter is not disposed to carry things to any such extreme; but I saw plainly that he was anxious to have Christine try her wings a bit, so when Dr. Mclvor came to pay his morning visit, I said very gravely, 175 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON "Christine is weak, of course, and not able to sit up to-day, I suppose." If I had put it the other way and asked a leading question he would have said no, at once, being a Scotchman; but to the question put this way, he answered de- cidedly, "Miss Christine is able to sit up. She will be the better for it." So having medical authority I went a step further, all in the pres- ence of the nurse, of course, and remarked that the balcony was warm and sunny in the after- noon. "Very good," said the M.D. "Let Miss Christine have an hour on the balcony this afternoon; shall I come to help you?" "Oh! not at all," I replied, "the nurse and I can manage beautifully." Now was not that generalship! You see I put all the responsibility on the "medical man." I am so glad that Christine's malady is not of a catching kind; indeed one does not hear quite so much about germs over here as with us. Perhaps because these old buildings are so saturated with germs, they think that a few more or less will make no difference. However that may be, I am allowed to be with Christine as long as I choose, and she had a gala day, playing jack straws and old maid all morning. A game of old maid between 176 ROMAN ENGLAND three spinsters, the nurse, who is young and what Walter calls "a good looker," making a third, is really exciting, even when one of them is under age. But this was nothing to the excitement of the afternoon when, after Chris- tine had had her luncheon and a nap, we decked her off in my pink tea-gown, which gave some color to her pale cheeks, and put her in a big arm-chair, they have nothing as civilized as a rocking-chair here, and carried her out on the balcony for afternoon tea. Miss H., who was in the plot, sent us up an extra good tea, buttered scones and a delectable cake that they have here, like sweet pastry and so hard that you have to break it with a hatchet; but de- licious when you get into it. We were just try- ing to break the tea cake with the poker, having no hatchet at hand, when Dr. Mclvor suddenly appeared, and seeing our dilemma showed us how a quick blow with the dull side of a table knife would reduce the cake to terms or, better still, to slivers. I think that he was just a bit uneasy about his patient, but when he saw Christine's beam- ing face he was reassured and entered in the spirit of the celebration, drinking about as many cups of tea as old Dr. Johnson and tell- ing stories which were much funnier than he 12 177 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON knew because of his Scotch brogue. It was quite a surprise to me, as he is usually so grave and dignified although by no means a dour Scotchman; but this afternoon he behaved like a boy out of school, and ended by giving us a Scotch toast. " Here's tae us. Wha's like us? Nane ava! Wha's as guid ? Dooms few ! " Then, seeing that Christine looked a bit tired, he became suddenly quite serious and picking her up in his arms carried her off to her bed, where she slept for an hour and looked so bright when Z. and Walter returned that I had courage to confess my sins. As this is a case of "All 's well that ends well," and the child has been improving ever since I took her out on the balcony for fresh air, the parents vote me a superior nurse and Dr. Mclvor would give me a diploma I am quite sure. Z. confided to me to-day that it was worth all the trouble and anxiety of Christine's illness to have the child become so fond of her. As if any one could help being fond of Z. ! She is the same dear old romantic thing, only more so if that is possible. I really think that Wal- ter appreciates what a treasure he has 178 ROMAN ENGLAND secured. Walter and Z. are a perfect Darby and Joan; but you and Allan are probably quite as bad, so there is no use complaining of them to you. This falling in love is a queer thing. We three boon companions have been scattered to remote parts of the globe by the tender pas- sion. I have only got back to Z. by the skin of my teeth, and you are still far away from me. "The only thing for you to do, Angela " Yes, I can hear you say it, dear; but I don't intend to. My heart is to be fancy free and my role to play the part of maiden aunt to you and Z., coming to look after you both in all emergencies like the present, and so to be a blessing to the rising generation. The M.D. has been more sedate than ever since our hilarious afternoon. He probably thinks he compromised his dignity by being perfectly natural and is now making amends for it by being quite formal. He wishes to conduct me through the museum of Roman antiquities. You know that antiquities are not exactly in my line; but I shall have to accept the invitation or Walter will think I am neg- lecting all my opportunities for higher educa- tion and all that. Of course, he is going with us, as he is really quite mad about these old things, even worse than Z. 179 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON August 10th. Driving and motoring are the order of the day, as Christine is able to be about and the fine dry air is good for her. The views of the walls and Cathedral from the various drives are so interesting; and just where the Ouse and the Foss join forces and make a great river there is a charming little bridge, the Blue Bridge, on which the names of the officers and soldiers of this district who fell in the Crimean "War are inscribed. Is not that a sweet memorial? So much better than a great statue in a park ! It is all so picturesque, the bridge overgrown with trees and vines, and a fine promenade near by, which extends all the way to Fulford landing. There has been no rain for two days and the sun is so warm that the " inclement weather in doors" has given place to something like summer. We drove to Bishopthorp this after- noon, the palace of the Archbishop of York, who is the Primate of England as the Arch- bishop of Canterbury is Primate of all England. To the American mind this may seem a distinc- tion without a difference but it means a great deal over here. Z. has found a curious little tale about the controversy between the Sees of York and Canterbury, which she begs me 180 ROMAN ENGLAND to copy for you: "Many and bitter contro- versies raged around the question. In 1176, at the Council of Westminster, Eichard of Can- terbury arriving first seated himself in the place of honor on the right hand of the Papal legate Huguccio. Eoger de Pont 1'Eveque, Archbishop of York, entering later seated him- self in Canterbury's lap! He was violently re- moved and ejected with cries of 'Away! away! betrayer of St. Thomas! His blood is still upon thy hands.' " Very indecorous of these reverend gentle- men to be sitting in each other's laps, was it not? Especially so as the "Most Eeverend and Eight Honorable" of York seems to have been of French extraction and should have had better manners. It appears that Eoger of York was suspected, and not without founda- tion, of having instigated the murder of Thomas a Becket. Z. is my authority for all of this, which interests her immensely, as she took a full course of Becket at Canterbury. She says that the long dispute was finally set- tled by Pope Innocent VI who gave the Bishops of the two Sees titles as nearly alike as the law would allow. "For a good free fight, give me a religious controversy!" exclaimed Walter, which made 181 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON the Scotchman laugh immoderately, thinking all the while, no doubt, of Jenny Geddes and her three-legged projectile. Everything was peaceful enough at Bishop- thorp, this afternoon, and a beautiful place it is, with a lawn sloping down to the river and fine trees and flowers. We were shown the lower rooms of the palace, as they call it, and some interesting portraits, which was so kind that I wondered why the family in residence did not extend its hospitality to the extent of inviting us to have tea with them on the lawn. These tea tables set out on the green are so alluring, and as we were the only visitors this afternoon it would have been a graceful act of interna- tional courtesy that would not have seriously taxed the episcopal larder. I am quite sure that if a party of English people happened to be visiting at any mansion at home, public or private, where refreshments were being served on the lawn, they would have been cordially invited to assist. And then our English brothers and sisters have grown so fond of us since the Spanish war, and since President Roosevelt took a hand in settling the difficulty between Russia and Japan, that no amount of civility would surprise us. Even English women whom we meet seem to realize that we have 182 ROMAN ENGLAND a President who counts for something in the affairs of the great world, and the first ques- tion that the men ask us is, "What is your President going to do?" They refer, of course, to that much-discussed "third term," as if anyone under the shining sun could an- swer such a question! We are to motor to Aldborough to-morrow to see the Roman museum there, but quite aside from that it will be enchanting to have a spin over these fine roads. Z. is anxious to see Coxwold where Sterne was vicar in his last years and where he wrote "The Sentimen- tal Journey," and Walter wants to see the battle-field of Marston Moor. It is quite a question whether the literary, warlike, and antiquarian tastes can be accommodated in one day even with the help of a motor, but Walter will manage it if it can be done. By the way, Z. did see a place near Durham where they said Elizabeth Barrett was born, and they saw the register of her birth, in 1806, in the parish church near by. She is quite tri- umphant, and yet she has regrets because this date settles conclusively the much-discussed question as to whether Elizabeth was three or six years older than Robert. Z. would prefer to have only three years between them, but it 183 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON really does not seem as if this fact should make much difference to us as it did not seem seriously to disturb the " contracting parties," as our newspapers would dub the two poets. The day after our Aldborough jaunt we go to London. The M.D. has announced that he intends to meet us there, as he wishes to be in London for the last days of the British Medical Association. Miss H. tells us that he is a laird in his own country, which probably does not mean much as I have heard that lairds are quite plentiful in Scotland; but since hearing this Z. is impressed by something about the carriage of his head which she considers a mark of blood. He certainly is not handsome ; quite the contrary; but he is quite good fun, and has a fine sense of humor, although "a bit slow about taking another fellow's jokes," as Walter puts it. Z. has been so much occupied with Christine that she seems to have forgotten how to write, but she will doubtless find out how to use her pen when she gets to London, and in any case you will be sure to hear from Your devoted ANGELA. VIII SIX DAYS IN LONDON CAVENDISH SQUARE, August 13th. LONDON is of course much less gay than when we left it in July. Hyde Park, where English beauty and East Indian rhododendrons both bloomed so luxuriantly in the season, is quite deserted, its much-coveted penny chairs unoc- cupied; its long line of carriages and their burden of gayly-dressed women, adorned with boas, floating veils, and scarfs, which they carry off with such infinite grace and charm, have betaken themselves to pastures new. The pink geraniums and daisies in the window boxes on Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, and along the upper part of Piccadilly, have faded and others have not come to take their places. In the shops we meet more American than English women, for this is the season when the London shopkeeper reaps a rich harvest from the trans- Atlantic tourist. The fact that "the dun year's brilliant flower" has ceased to bloom does not disturb us. London is never 185 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON really dull. The theatres are all open, the grass in its many parks is as green as in June, and the procession of omnibuses bearing their populations on top, and announcing on their many-colored sides that patent medicines and pre-digested foods are still in favor, continue to stream, five abreast, along the Strand and by Oxford and Eegent Streets and on and out to places with captivatingly rural and refresh- ing names, as Hampstead Heath, Shepherd's Bush, Forest Gate, Kew Gardens and the like. We long to stop each one as it passes, and climb up the narrow steps to the dizzy heights above, and stagger into a seat and be borne away, far above the " madding crowd," to the regions of pure delight that lie all around and about the great city of London. And then, not the least attractive, so many of the old historic buildings and galleries are open and waiting to be visited by the " Abounding American," as one of the English magazines is pleased to call us. Indeed a great part of London, down by the Strand, and Ludgate Hill, and by the Tem- ple and the Inns of Court, only recognizes the advent of summer by the spreading forth of its greenery and never knows that going-away time has really come. Dr. Mclvor met us at the station, as he came 186 SIX DAYS IN LONDON a day in advance of us in order to attend the last sessions of the British Medical, and al- though his chief business is with the M.D.'s, he seems to have plenty of time to devote to us. The business meetings of the Association are really over and the parties have begun. Last night, through the courtesy of our young Scotchman, we attended a reception at the Bo- tanical Gardens. The grounds were en fete, beautifully illuminated, the flowers gorgeous, the Victoria Begia blooming absolutely on time, besides which we had the honor of being re- ceived by royalty, or, to be more exact, by those nearly related to royalty. Do you remember being at a garden party here some years ago when the Duchess of Teck was receiving? She was so very stout but handsome and with so much graciousness and charm of manner! To-day, again through an invitation from Dr. Mclvor, we spent the morning at Windsor. It is really an advantage to follow a proces- sion, on such occasions, as all doors flew open before us, and we had the satisfaction of being inside the Albert Chapel and having a nearer view of all the tombs, memorials and medal- lions, which you and I only saw through the grating when we were here. There are some beautiful things in the Chapel and it is all 187 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON very rich, but on the whole it does not seem to me quite in good taste. The noble recumbent figures of the Prince Consort and of his young- est son, the Duke of Albany, we admired very much, and the bronze figure of the Duke of Clarence is impressive, not only for its beauty but because of all that his early death meant to his family and to England. Even more pa- thetic, is the cenotaph erected by Queen Vic- toria in memory of the Prince Imperial of France, in St. George's Chapel. You must remember this beautiful tomb, with a reclining figure of the young Napoleon, all of pure white marble, with the most touching inscriptions on the sides of the base. On one side are expres- sions of grateful affection for the royal family of England, copied from the Prince's will, and oh the other is a most beautiful prayer, of his own composition, used by him in his private devotions. This young Prince seems to have had some fine and noble traits, and the poor boy, who had his first experience of the horrors of war at Sedan, certainly deserved a better fate than to fall a victim to a wretched blunder. Such a perfectly useless sacrifice of a young life! Angela says that it was "tragic"; but Dr. Mclvor, who has a strong Scotch prejudice against the whole Bonaparte family, says that 188 SIX DAYS IN LONDON it would have been even more tragic, and that the history of France would have been re- written in many a bloody page, had the Prince lived. That may be ; but it was an infinitely pathetic life and death, and this cenotaph was a grace- ful tribute from the mother of many children to the brave, young son of the lonely Empress at Chiselhurst who, in a few months, lost all that made life worth living. There is much to interest one in this chapel, with all its garter stalls and rich emblematic decorations, but we spent most of our time before Wyatt's exquisite monument to the Princess Charlotte, which looked more beau- tiful than ever to-day with the warm golden light, streaming through the colored glass win- dows above it, upon that perfect ascending figure of the young mother with her child in her arms. It is not only so lovely in design and execution but is the most artistically ar- ranged monument that I have ever seen. Christine was so much interested, when we ex- plained to her that the young Princess and her baby had died at the same time, and that she would have been Queen of England had she lived, that we have promised to take her to the National Gallery to see a portrait of the Prin- 189 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON cess Charlotte, and to Kensington Palace, where there are some memorials of her. The King has greatly improved the interior of Windsor Palace, since you were here. Some of the rooms have been refurnished and are very handsome, especially the great dining- halls with their paintings and fine carvings by Grindling Gibbons. Those used for the enter- tainment of royal guests were shown to us, but we did not see the private apartments of the royal family, as they are no longer shown to the public. The paintings all through the palace are so interesting that we began to realize the disadvantage of being in a proces- sion, as we were often obliged to "move on" when we should have preferred to stand still before the Van Dycks, Lelys, Knellers and Gainsboroughs of the many French, English and Spanish royalties. The full-length por- trait of Queen Henrietta Maria, and of Mary. Queen of Scots, are the most beautiful of their many portraits, and the lovely Van Dyck of the children of Charles I is something one would like to carry away bodily. Out upon the terrace which overlooks the river we enjoyed the extensive view of Wind- sor Park, the Eton School buildings, and of Stoke Manor and Park in the distance. The 190 SIX DAYS IN LONDON guide showed us the window where Queen Anne was sitting when the news of the victory of Blenheim was brought to her. It seemed very real to us when we thought of the Queen looking out upon this same beautiful view that we were gazing upon, especially so as we hap- pened to be here on the two hundred and third anniversary of this battle. The bearer of the good news, Colonel Daniel Parke, is intimately connected with our own history. Perhaps you have seen his portrait in Virginia, as he settled there and became the ancestor of the Custis family, who still own the portrait of this dis- tinguished gentleman, dressed in a grand suit of crimson velvet with the Queen's gift, her miniature surrounded by diamonds, suspended from his neck. Inside the palace we saw the busts of the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington, which are always decorated with fresh banners by their respective families before twelve noon on the anniversaries of the battles of Blen- heim and Waterloo. The Blenheim banners did look fresh and new, and the guide said that the title, or property, was in some way involved in the proper performance of this ceremony. I thought so often of Miss Burney, as we walked along the lovely terrace with the gar- 191 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON dens beneath. She speaks so much of this terrace and of walking there with the "good Queen" and her children, especially with the pretty little Princess Amelia, and of Mrs. Delany, who was so frequently here with the royal family. August 14th. Angela, with her usual amiability, offered to take the girls upon a little shopping tour, this morning, and Walter and I, feeling quite free from the responsibilities of life, have car- ried out a long-cherished plan of spending a day in the haunts of Dr. Johnson. Before starting on this eighteenth century pilgrimage, he went with me to the church in which Mrs. Browning was married, stopping on our way at the house No. 50 Wimpole Street, where the Barretts lived. Neither of these places is far from the house where we are stopping on Cavendish Square; indeed these dingy old streets are set thick with associations of the good and great, and of the wild and wicked as well, who are, as Walter remarks, "quite as interesting if not more so." Byron was born at 24 Holies Street, near by; George Romney, "the man in Cavendish Square," as Sir Joshua was wont to call him, lived and painted for years at No. 32, and Barry Corn- 192 SIX DAYS IN LONDON, wall had a house on Harley Street where he welcomed all the literati of his time. On Great Portland Street, around the corner from our hotel, poor old "Bozzy" died, after completing the great work of his life, and our own Ben- jamin West lived for years on Newman Street. We could make historic and literary pilgrim- ages, within a small radius of Cavendish Square, for a fortnight and still have some- thing left to do. We had no difficulty in finding the church near Marylebone Eoad which they call the New Marylebone Church, although it looks old and dismal, without having any of the beauty that the years bring to the really ancient churches. The interior is cold enough in at- mosphere, as well as in architecture, to have given the poor bride a chill upon the spot, this churchly gloom being added to all the trying circumstances attending her marriage. The place in front of the altar was shown to us where Elizabeth Barrett stood during the ceremony, "more dead than alive," as she expressed it, "and only supported by my trust in him." To this church Eobert Browning came whenever he was in London, and never failed, we were told, to kiss the floor where her feet had rested. 13 193 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON There was no service this morning, and the only person in the church was an old char- woman who was washing up the floor. She stopped in the midst of her work, and went off in search of the clerk, who looked up the mar- riage record, under date of September, 1846, and showed us the signature of Kobert Brown- ing and of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, written in a small tremulous hand. The name of the curate is given, and one of the two witnesses to the ceremony was the faithful Wilson, Mrs. Browning's maid. The clerk also showed us the programme of the jubilee cele- bration of 1896, upon which occasion the Arch- bishop of Canterbury and many other distin- guished persons were present, a sad golden wedding anniversary, when the bride and groom were both dead! After we left the church we took an omnibus down to Piccadilly, this being a democratic expedition and no cabs permitted, and so by Trafalgar Square to the Strand and St. Clement Danes, which is so oddly placed across the street near where the Strand sud- denly becomes Fleet Street. Dr. Johnson used to worship in this old church and we should, by rights, have seen the interior, but it seems always to be closed and the police could suggest no means of opening those inhospitable doors. 194 SIX DAYS IN LONDON Fleet Street, where once flowed the pleasant little river Fleet, is filled with associations of Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, and all the mem- bers of the genial circle that was continually meeting at the Mitre, the Cheshire Cheese, and all the many inns of this part of London. At the Cheshire Cheese we saw the old dictionary- maker's chair, so worn that it was clamped in places to keep it from falling to pieces. In (rough's Square, near by, is the four-storied house, with its many chimneys, in which John- son wrote the greater part of his dictionary. It was in this house that his wife died, and here he afterwards lived with the strangely assorted family that his kindness of heart had drawn around him Miss "Williams, an impe- cunious poetess ; Levett, a broken-down apothe- cary, and several others in similar condition. "Here," says Mrs. Thrale, "he nursed whole nests of people, the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful." A nest, it was, in which the poor old birds were frequently unpleasant and quarrelsome, as the benevolent host him- self described them in one of his last letters: "Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Des- moulins, and does not love Williams; Des- moulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them." 195 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON As we learned that Dr. Johnson had lived in no less than sixteen houses in London, we gave up any idea we may have entertained of visit- ing all of his homes, and turned our steps toward Chancery Lane, through which little "Miss Flite" passed so often on her fruitless errands. Eeturning by Fetter's Lane and the new Kecord Office, we crossed Fleet Street and strolled down winding lanes to the Temple Church. Is there anything in all London more interesting than this round church, which was built as a memorial of the Holy Sepulchre, with its richly-carved Norman porch and its beauti- ful interior? On the stone floor lie the effigies of eight armed knights, all of whom have not been identified although the antiquarians seem pretty sure that one of them is Eobert Eos, a Magna Charta baron. The church looks so many years older than the choir that it is not easy to believe that only fifty years or so lie between them. The choir is handsome and rich in decoration ; but is much less impressive than the lovely old round church. We walked through it and around it and, upon the north side near the master's house, we came upon the grave of Goldsmith in a quiet corner, under the shadow of an ivy-covered wall. A bunch of fresh flowers was laid upon the grave, which 196 SIX DAYS IN LONDON bears the simple inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." Wandering through the cloisters and in and out of courts, retracing our steps more than once, as we had not Gay's Trivia to guide us " where winding alleys lead the doubtful way," we finally emerged upon the large open space called Brick Court. It was here, in chambers on the second floor, that Goldsmith lived during his last years, giving parties to young people where there were dancing and blind-man's buff, making many people happy and at the same time driving almost to madness, by the racket above him, the learned Mr. Blackstone, who was engaged upon his Commentaries in the room beneath. And then, joy of joys, by ways that I could not possibly describe, we came upon a still, green court where a fountain was playing. I don't see how we could have missed this lovely spot when we came to the Middle Temple Hall, which is quite near, and saw the long table where the Benchers dine, and the platform upon which Twelfth Night was acted before Queen Elizabeth, and all the other wonders of the Temple ; but as we came upon the fountain this morning it seemed quite new to us. Then 197 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON remembering Dickens' description of Kuth Pinch coming to meet her brother Tom near Fountain Court, we knew that this was the place toward which she was walking briskly, with "the best little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the fountain and beat it all to nothing. ' ' And then, by pure accident in this most "unlikely spot/' as Tom says, the lover appeared instead of the brother. As John Westlock overtook the dainty little figure in the "sanctuary of Garden Court" and walked off with her, "Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until they broke into a laugh against the basin rim, and vanished." The fountain could not have leaped and danced more merrily for Dickens' happy lovers than it leaped and danced and plashed for us to-day, throwing its spray high into the sunlit air and sprinkling with its diamond drops the many doves that were bathing and preening upon the brim, as in Pliny's famous basin in Eome. It was so cool and refreshing in this Court, under the shade of the great trees, here in the very heart of London, with no sound to break the stillness save the plashing of the fountain, 108 SIX DAYS IN LONDON that we were tempted to linger long. Some- where over beyond the Brick Court Johnson once lived, and behind us in the Crown Eow Offices Charles Lamb was born, in the midst of all that he afterward so loved, and beneath us, at the foot of the stone steps, is the rich green lawn of the Temple Gardens. Here, where there is a blaze of color to-day, scarlet and pink geraniums, the largest fuchsias I have ever seen, and lobelias as blue as the sea at Naples, in this fair garden, were plucked the "red and white roses of York and Lancaster." So Shakespeare tells us and so we believe; for Warwick says, " This brawl today, Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, Shall send, beneath the red roses and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night." The green lawn slopes down to the Victoria Embankment and beyond is the Thames, on whose proud stream afloat passed many gay pageants to and from Westminster, and many a sorrowful company to the Tower below. We had some luncheon at a qhop house not far away, and then by more winding ways, by Covent Garden and Clare Markets, and by Drury Lane Theatre and Lincoln's Inn Fields, 199 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON and through a narrow dismal street, we reached "Tom all alone 's," the graveyard by whose iron gate poor Joe used to stand and upon whose stone steps Lady Dedlock was found dead, one chill morning. The old grave- yard will have more cheerful associations, in the future, as it seems to be used for a chil- dren's play-ground. Later in the afternoon we met Angela and the children and Dr. Mclvor at Gunter's, on Berkeley Square, where we had some tea and ices, the latter so delicious that we decided that their pastry cook must be a Londoner of Amer- ican extraction. Angela had some amusing shopping experiences to relate, and when I told Dr. Mclvor that when we stopped at St. Bartholomew's the curate was conducting the service with only one small boy in lieu of a congregation, and expressed my surprise at his devout attitude and responses, the Doctor laughed so immoderately that I really felt un- comfortable until he explained that these old churches were obliged to hold a certain number of services in order to retain their livings, and that my "devout boy" had probably been bribed to come to church and didn't at all enjoy being an entire congregation in one. Was not our day in the old city one of un- 200 SIX DAYS IN LONDON mixed delight? No wonder that Dr. Johnson exclaimed, when he sat with Bo swell at the Mitre Tavern, near Temple Bar: "Sir, the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we sit than in all the rest of the kingdom." There is no other city in which we could have taken a walk among associations so inter- esting and so varied, except Borne. London and Eome, those two great cities so different and both so rich in background, in atmos- phere and association, are still the places that we return to again and again with fresh enjoyment. August 16th. With only six days in London, for Walter says that he must go to Oxford on Monday to meet his engagement, it is not easy to choose be- tween good, better and best. We wish to have Christine and Lisa see some of the buildings and places that they will be likely to remember, and in view of my own bewilderment over the Elgin marbles, which were to me somewhat like the Eleusinian Mysteries, we spent an hour in the British Museum this morning. This seems a short time for so vast a collection, too 201 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON great for one mind to grasp in days, but it seems the part of wisdom to pick out a few things from the mass and concentrate upon them, rather than scatter one's interest over a number of objects. And so much can be seen in an hour if one knows a place as we know the Museum. We went straight to the Elgin mar- bles. How I should have loved to see these exquisite reliefs when I was a school-girl, and what advantages the girls of to-day have over us! They really should be much brighter. Here are these children suddenly brought face to face with the wonders of the world, and all that we have a right to expect of them is that they may carry away in their minds some scat- tered impressions of beauty and grace. Marvels from Assyria, from Egypt, from everywhere, are gathered here, and from Greece these ex- quisite marbles, the Three Fates from the Parthenon, and the long processions of grace- ful figures, moving to the sound of music, with their clinging, floating draperies, so lovely, broken and fragmentary as they are, that we wondered how they could have been more im- pressive in their perfection. ' ' The last word in plastic art." Shall the world ever again pro- duce anything as beautiful, and will it ever re-capture 202 SIX DAYS IN LONDON " That long lost spell in secret given, To draw down gods and lift the soul to heaven " ? In the Grseco-Eoman room is the superb Discobolus, quoit-thrower, and the exquisite Aphrodite loosing her sandal; and here is the Demeter of Cnidos that you and I were never weary of looking at, such strength and dig- nity of pose, and so much sweetness and nobil- ity of expression in the lovely womanly face! Broken and imperfect as it is, it still holds us fast by its serene beauty and human tender- ness, by which last attribute it might easily stand as a symbol of the universal motherhood. No children gather around the goddess, but one can well fancy them encircling her knees with their little arms and pillowing their heads upon her ample bosom, for love and protecting care are written upon the lines of the tender mouth and softly rounded chin of this generous and bountiful Ceres. Passing through the Eoman galleries, where all the Emperors stand, I felt as if we were almost in the Museum of the Vatican with you and Allan, there is so much here to remind one of it ! Yet with all the art and beauty that we meet here, we must always miss those three marvellous figures standing close together, the 203 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Laocoon, the "Lord of the unerring bow," and the perfect Antinous; and then, in a way, one misses something of the Italian atmosphere that so irradiates its marbles, for which the cold gray light of this cold gray building gives us no equivalent. Here is the noble figure of Hadrian, whom we seem to know better since we have seen something of his works in the north of England, the strong, earnest face of one who has accomplished much and to whom the world has revealed much. Philosopher, lawmaker, nation builder, philanthropist and traveller, in his last days, when clouds and darkness gathered about him, how infinitely pathetic is the great Emperor's invocation to his own soul in view of its final journey! Dr. Mclvor was with us, and being fresh from his classical studies was able to repeat the well- known lines: "Ah, fleeting spirit! wandering fire, That long hast warmed my tender breast, Must thou no more this frame inspire, No more a pleasing cheerful guest? Whither, ah, whither art thou flying? To what dark, undiscovered shore ? " "Was not our hour a profitable one? Instead of walking through miles of statues, which is one way of doing a gallery, we really enjoyed 204 SIX DAYS IN LONDON what we saw; and we did not quite neglect the porcelains and gems, as we went upstairs to see the precious stones, intaglios, and cameos, and above all to have a look at the Portland Vase, which is near the jewels, as it should be, being a gem of exquisite color. As we were admiring the cameo designs upon the sides, and marvelling over the ingenuity that had put together the hundred fragments into a perfect whole, Angela turned her laughing face to Dr. Mclvor, and said, "After all, I don't think it is what it 's cracked up to be; do you?" Dr. Mclvor looked surprised and rather shocked, at Angela's lack of taste, and then seeing us all laugh, even the children, as we had just explained to them how the vase had been cracked and broken, he grasped the fact that a joke was in the air, and laughed so im- moderately that Walter warned him that he was in danger of being arrested by the guard, M.D.'s being especially unpopular here as it was a "medical man" who once shattered the precious vase. Walter insists, now at nine P.M., that the Doctor is still laughing, adding, "If these Scotchmen are a long time taking a joke, they know how to hold on to it all right ! ' ' Hampton Court in summer time is quite too attractive to be neglected, and we had an after- 205 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON noon there in the galleries among the famous Lelys and Van Dycks, that you know so well, and in the grounds, by the lake, where swans, black and white, are always floating by under the bridges. Later on, we took a steam tram to Richmond, and climbed up a long hill to the Star and Garter, where we had tea on the ter- race and thought of that July day when we were all so merry here together. One of the very same waiters brought us our tea, a Frenchman, who beamed with delight when he saw us, called Angela " Madame," asked after "Monsieur," and looked askance at Dr. Mclvor, wondering, I suppose, why Archie had left his fair bride so soon, and why another had taken his place. It was all so absurd that, just to see what would happen next, I talked to Angela about Archie until, for some unac- countable reason, she blushed rosy red, upon which Dr. Mclvor assumed his most serious professional air, became very distant in his manner to "the grown ups," and devoted him- self exclusively to Christine and Lisa for the remainder of the afternoon. The sail down the Thames, by the light of the crescent moon, was so enchanting that it would have dispelled depression much more profound than Dr. Mclvor 's, which yielded to 206 SIX DAYS IN LONDON the influence of the hour and the scene. We were soon talking together merrily, he relat- ing to us some quaint Scotch superstitions and folklore that we all delight in as much as the children, and Walter capping the Doctor's tales with some of our American folklore. SUNDAY, August 18th. Is there anything in Puritan New England more Puritanical than a London Sunday? It really gives one some faint conception of what England must have been under the Pro- tectorate, and always comes as a fresh sur- prise to me after a sojourn on the Continent. One cannot fail to respect a nation that main- tains its own ideals so persistently, when only a narrow channel separates it from the gayest of Sunday keepers. However the brilliant throng, that we saw in Hyde Park earlier in the summer, may be spending its Sundays at Continental resorts, the mass of the British nation seems to respect the day. They very sensibly enjoy their parks in the afternoons, but how full the churches are in the mornings ! We have noticed this in the smaller towns, as well as in London. Petticoat Lane, which we visited this morning under Dr. Mclvor's guid- ance, seems to be governed by none of the regu- 207 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON lations that control the rest of London, for here was the Continental Sunday and we felt that we might be in Italy, France, anywhere except in England. Carts and booths lined the streets, upon which all sorts of wares were displayed, shoes and old clothes, which the venders put on to show how good they were; high hats, disreputable and battered; second- hand silver plate and tinware, trumpery trink- ets and finery the worse for the wear, and any quantity of eatables, if we may so call the stale unsavory fish, meat and vegetables, and the unripe fruits, that were set forth upon these stalls. And yet, strange as it may seem, there was an undercurrent of gayety in Petticoat Lane. In some places the women and children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ or hurdy- gurdy, and everywhere there was chattering and chaffering. Perhaps it was a little more cheerful this morning because the day was unusually fine, and the general largess of fresh air and sunshine is something that the poorest street may share. Although we had, at Dr. Mclvor's request, worn our plainest and darkest clothes, and left our trinkets and watches at home, we noticed that a "bobby" kept quite close to us all the 208 SIX DAYS IN LONDON time. We could see no necessity for this, for although there was poverty and wretchedness on all sides, we saw very few really hard and desperate faces. Dr. Mclvor, who is familiar with all of this region, says that there are depths of misery in some of these lanes and alleys that we could not possibly fathom. Once, when we were passing a group of men playing some game, he drew Angela's hand through his arm and hurried her along, mo- tioning us to follow quickly. I think that he was relieved when the tour of inspection was over; but as it appeared to us, the poverty was less abject than that of Liverpool, and alas! for our boasted New World prosperity, it seemed not much worse than many of the streets of our own cities. A number of foreign faces were among the London born. " Little Italys" there are here, as with us at home. Thinking this a good opportunity to see the People's Palace, we came out by Whitechapel Road and past Toynbee Hall, and took an om- nibus on Mile End Eoad. All this East End of London, made so familiar to us by Walter Besant's novel, is quite different, and more modern than the London of Johnson and Dickens that we wandered through on Wed- nesday, and is apparently more prosperous' 14 209 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON than the Whitechapel district. Dr. Mclvor says that this quarter is chiefly inhabited by artisans. He lived here himself for a time, as one of the resident physicians at the London Hospital, which we passed. We were glad to see so much of the East End ; but unfortunately we found the People's Palace closed. Why should any good place be closed on a Sunday, when it is most needed, when the gin palaces and all the dens of iniquity are wide open? Quite aside from our disappointment in not seeing the "Palace of Delight," this survival of Puritanism aroused our indigna- tion ; but we were somewhat mollified when the Doctor told us that the house was opened in the afternoons and evenings for organ recitals. So, in a comparatively Christian frame of mind, we made our way to Westminster Abbey, where we were joined by the children, some friends who are stopping at our house having brought them to meet us. We sat in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey near the tombs of Tennyson and Browning and Chaucer, with Dryden's, Longfellow's, and many more sculptured faces looking down upon us, and listened to a very good sermon from our favorite Canon Wilberforce, just as you and I have sat there so often. You know the Abbey 210 SIX DAYS IN LONDON so well that there is no use telling you anything about it, but one thing which we saw may in- terest you. We have so often noticed fresh flowers on the tombs of Dickens and of some of the poets, but the other day when we were here we saw some white chrysanthemums upon the Andre monument, and a small cross of goldenrod to which a card was attached, with a few lines written upon it, saying, that "Every American schoolboy regrets the fate of Major Andre, and this goldenrod has been brought from Delaware, in America, as a tribute to the young English soldier." Some people, evidently English, had been reading the card and seemed puzzled by the words. I wondered if they never heard of Andre. Perhaps not, as the American Revolu- tion is a far less important event in their his- tory than in our own. I, for one, quite sympathize with the American schoolboy, but the men of the party both insist that when Andre put himself in the position of a spy he made himself liable to suffer the consequences, and had no right to expect anything else. Angela says that is a very cold-blooded way of looking at it and that the whole affair was "tragic," upon which she and Dr. Mclvor had an animated discussion. "With all due respect 211 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON to Washington, it has always seemed to me that, in view of his youth and of many extenu- ating circumstances, the life of John Andre might have been spared, but Walter insists that the execution of young Hale by the British made the hanging of Andre a necessity accord- ing to the code of war. All the necessities of war are so horrible, that one is glad to look about this great Abbey and realize that here the victories of peace are quite as generously crowned as those of war. When shall we, in the streets of our capital, erect monuments to novelists, poets, philosophers, statesmen, sci- entists, philanthropists, and all the other great ones, who have helped to make life more livable, as they have done here, instead of the ever- recurring man on horseback? What a wonderfully thrilling and inspiring place the Abbey is, even if many of the monu- ments are not to our taste! We went to the gorgeous Henry VII Chapel, as I always do, to see again the recumbent figure of Mary, Queen of Scots, which, despite the fact that Baedeker speaks of it as " inartistic," is quite lovely to my less critical eye. Here Mary Stu- art reigns in beauty, in death as in life, and is it not one of time's revenges that, even after Elizabeth had wreaked her worst upon her 212 SIX DAYS IN LONDON rival, Mary's descendants still sit upon the throne of Great Britain, and are likely to sit there as long as England is a monarchy ! This reminds me of our afternoon at Kensington Palace, where we spent an hour or more amolig the associations of Mary Stuart's descendant by several removes. Here are many personal belongings of the late Queen, from her tiny black satin baby shoes to her wedding bonnet, a quite good-sized scoop trimmed with tulle and orange blossoms. It was pleasant to look at the Queen's old bonnet, and think how happy the bride was who wore it. You and I, for some reason, have never found our way to this old Palace. "We went for the children's pleas- ure but we enjoyed it quite as much ourselves. They were delighted to see the Princess Vic- toria's playthings, such simple little wooden toys, Noah's arks and a doll's house with the plainest furniture, a great contrast to the elab- orate toys that children even in moderate cir- cumstances have to-day. I was especially interested in the Queen's library, which King Edward has placed here since his mother's death. All of her books seem to be in this collection, from those given to her in her baby- hood down to presentation copies from au- thors sent to her during the last years of her 213 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON life. On the fly leaf of many of the earlier books is written, "To my beloved Victoria from her Mamma," and upon one, of which I could not see the name, is written, "To my beloved Victoria on the day of her Confirma- tion," with' the date, which was not a very early one, about 1835, a short time before she was crowned. These souvenirs were all inter- esting to me, as is everything connected with the very natural and sweet domestic life of the Queen and her family. Our Scotchman is not quite as much attached to Queen Victoria as I am, and Angela says: "She never could have been handsome, no matter how many times she was Queen of England, Empress of India, and all that," which latter title Dr. Mclvor scoffs at, calling it one of "Dizzy's manufacture." In speaking to some English ladies, of our afternoon at Kensington Palace, they expressed great interest in what we had seen and regaled us with a rather amusing story about the Prin- cess Eoyal, who, according to all accounts, must have been a very high-strung and independent child. One day when little Victoria was work- ing in her garden, her royal mamma remon- strated with her on account of her extravagance in wearing gloves that she thought quite too good for the purpose, adding, "When I was a 214 SIX DAYS IN LONDON little girl, my dear, I never wore such good gloves to work in my garden." Upon which Victoria junior replied, "Oh, I dare say; but then you were not born Princess Royal of Eng- land!" Delicious, was n't it? I can almost hear the Queen laughing over the cleverness of her eldest born, as she had, I believe, some sense of humor although she did not show it when she administered chastisement to one of the young princes with the proverbial slipper, in the pres- ence of some dignitaries of the Court. There, I must really stop gossiping with you about the royal family and begin to pack, as our trunks go to Oxford, early to-morrow morning, by the car- rier. Does that not have a Dickensian sound? IX STORIED WINDOWS RICHLY DIGHT THE GRILLING, OXFORD, August 19th. WHEN our Scotchman left us last night we thought to see him no more, but he appeared this morning, bright and smiling, saying that he had had a letter from home, the night be- fore, which made it possible for him to spend a day with us in Oxford. Walter and I are glad to have him, and the children adore him and are never tired of his tales of fairies, bogies, and all the quaint lore in which the Scotch delight. And Angela? I hear you ask; and quite unreasonably, you must admit, as you know well that you and I could never quite under- stand Angela when there was any question of suitors. At times she is so charming to Dr. Mclvor that I tremble for his peace of mind, and again, without rhyme or reason, she is so short and crusty that I have to be so very nice to him to make amends, that Angela actually 216 STORIED WINDOWS accuses me of flirting with him, which I tell her is disrespectful to my gray hairs, and most ungrateful, when I was only trying to smooth over her asperities. He seems to have quite recovered his spirits since our Eichmond experience, and bears Angela's variations of temperature with great equanimity. I really have no right to speak of Dr. Mclvor as a suitor, so please look upon that as a figure of speech. He is apparently equally devoted to us all, except that he may be a little more attentive to Christine, of whose improved appearance he is very proud. He talks to Walter and to me much more than to Angela; but one nat- urally wonders why he accompanies us so persistently. He and Walter are congenial companions, to be sure, but is it for the love of Walter, or Christine, or for the sake of my beaux yeux that he seems ready to leave everything and follow us? Now he is talking of joining us in Devonshire and spending his summer vacation there. I fancy that like many another young doctor, there is more holiday than work in his life at present. Our journey to-day was enchanting, as we came from Wallingford to Oxford by the water ways that I love. At Wallingford, where we lunched upon every known variety of cold 217 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON meat, and it sometimes seems as if there were more cold meats to be had in England than anywhere else, we had time before the boat started to walk about and see the old church where Blackstone, the great jurist, is buried, which was, of course, interesting to Wal- ter. A few miles above Wallingford the trial "Eights" of Oxford are rowed. The river trip is most interesting, through a number of locks, and by picturesque villages and country- seats. All that was needed to make the after- noon a perfect success was sunshine, which has deserted us to-day, but even so the river was full of boating parties, the men in light summer costume, and the women in the delicate pinks and blues in which they delight. Surely there are no people who enjoy out-of-door life and make the best of their somewhat uncomfort- able climate as do the English except the Scotch, perhaps. When we expressed surprise at seeing so many boats on the river this dull chilly afternoon, the Doctor said, "Why, what would you have? It doesn't rain, and I do not believe we shall have more than a sprinkle before we get to Oxford." We had a quite lively sprinkle in the course of the afternoon, which did not, however, disturb the serenity of the water parties. 218 STORIED WINDOWS The Thames flows through level pasture lands and, in some places, is so narrow that it seems more like a winding meadow brook than a river, but it is infinitely picturesque with the trees and bushes growing so close to the shore on both sides that their reflections in the clear stream meet and mingle, while their branches dip and bathe their leaves in the sparkling water. Narrow as it is here one would not have the Thames an inch wider. In England more than in most places, we learn the beauty of landscapes in miniature, such as Constable gives us with his own irresistible charm. Just where the Thames becomes the Isis no one seems to be able to tell us. At Sandford, three miles from Oxford, we were still upon the Thames, and without any notice whatever we found ourselves floating upon the classic Isis near the picturesque Iffley Mill. You re- member it, I am sure, and the old Norman church behind the mill. We are coming some day to see it and its beautiful carved door- ways. At Culham Lock we passed under a curious bridge, with arches of four different shapes, and soon after we came to Sandford and the wooded slopes of Nuneham Courtenay, which Hawthorne found "as perfect as any- 219 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON thing earthly can be. ' ' Near Iffley, the Thames or the Isis, whichever it is, widens into quite a respectable river. Here the University races are rowed, and barges and house-boats abound. My only association with a house-boat is in Rudder Grange, but these floating domiciles are so well adapted to the conditions surround- ing them that it would, I fancy, be quite impos- sible to have the amusing experiences in any of them that befell the characters in Mr. Stock- ton's tale. The children are excited over the idea of keeping house in a boat, and I must confess that the idea appeals to my imagina- tion as well. Shall we come here some summer and take a house-boat for a month and learn to know this beautiful Thames, "turf and twig and water and soyle," which, after all, can hardly boast a lovelier spot than by the lock at Iffley Mill, whose odd gables and straight tall poplars are suggestive of a landscape on the Seine rather than the approach to Eng- land's greatest university town. Near where the Cherwell flows into the Isis we caught a glimpse of many spires, and the square tower of Magdalen, and realized that we were coming into Oxford. At Folly Bridge we were met by a curious nondescript vehicle, more like a double hansom than anything else, 220 STORIED WINDOWS in which we were driven to our lodgings. We are really in lodgings this time and most com- fortably situated in a suite of rooms which are students' quarters in term time. We have a large dining- and living-room combined, into which our bed-rooms open, and so are quite en famille. Although we enjoy the freedom of this way of living, I have not given up my preference for the sociability of the table d'hote, which we enjoyed so much in York. Our front windows look down upon the High not far from Carfax, and we enter our lodging through a court that opens into a flower mar- ket filled with gorgeous autumnal flowers, which makes our coming and going somewhat festive and distinctly rural, although we are in the very heart of Oxford with more col- leges within walking distance than we could see in a fortnight. Miss Cassandra is here. We met her on the High, where one meets all one's acquaint- ances in Oxford. She is stopping with friends who live in a lovely country-seat near Iffley, but to-morrow she leaves for Cambridge to join her niece and visit other friends there. She seems always to have hosts of friends waiting to receive her, and like the royal family her advent is heralded in some way even if it does 221 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON not get into the newspapers. Walter tells Miss Cassandra that he verily believes "that if she suddenly appeared upon an oasis in the desert of Sahara, she would find a friend sitting under a palm tree, fanning herself, and wondering why her camel is so late." We were on our way to Christ Church and the Bodleian Library and begged Miss Cas- sandra to bear us company, which she was nothing loath to do. Angela and the children were fascinated by her, of course, and I watched Dr. Mclvor's face with considerable interest. He had never seen a Quakeress and Miss Cassandra's speech and manner evidently interested him, as he never took his eyes off her when she was talking, and asked me hun- dreds of questions about the Friends after- wards. He will never suffer from lack of questioning upon any and all subjects; but like most Scotch people he seems to object to an- swering questions, and when he does it is in such a roundabout way that we "have to dig out the meanings," as Angela says. This morning we were " personally conducted" by the Doctor, who knows Oxford well, having , taken some special courses here. He took us to see the old tombs and monuments at Christ Church, especially the shrine of St. Frideswide, 222 STORIED WINDOWS whose nunnery dates back to 740. The shrine, he says, was probably a "watching chamber;" he also showed us arches and bits of the old nunnery walls which Cardinal Wolsey for- tunately left standing, although his intention was to pull down all of the ancient building and erect a magnificent structure to be called Cardi- nal's College. The Prior's tomb, that of Sir George Nowers, a companion of our dear Black Prince, and that of Lady Elizabeth de Monta- cute, who gave a meadow to Christ Church, are the oldest here and for some reason look even older than they are. We walked through the superb dining hall where so many portraits hang, one of Cardinal Wolsey in his brilliant scarlet robes, a striking portrait of Henry VIII, one of Queen Elizabeth, and many more. It is altogether a most gorgeous mediaeval hall, with its rich carvings of Irish oak and many armorial bearings, only second in richness to that at Westminster. From the dining hall we went down into the kitchens, which are very old and interesting, just as they were built by Wol- sey, reminding one by their size and substantial structure of the Kitchens of St. Louis. Miss Cassandra was particularly interested in a monster gridiron, or spit, on wheels, a relic of the cuisine of the past when a large number of 223 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON students were cooked for at Christ's, many more, they tell us, than are here to-day. We crossed the Great Quadrangle of Christ Church, the largest in Oxford, and coming out by the Tom Gate we were so near the Broad Walk that we were tempted to stroll under the trees to the narrow street that leads to Merton, and Corpus Christi. Eeally one cannot walk a hundred yards here with- out coming upon something rich and strange, like the old gateway of Merton, with the remarkable carvings over the arch of John the Baptist preaching in the Wilderness, Henry III, and other important personages of widely different periods. This gate, one of the oldest things in Oxford, is one of the most interesting and picturesque. By ways that we knew not and with very lit- tle walking Dr. Mclvor brought us to Oriel, whose beautiful windows overlook one of its quads, this college being blessed with two quadrangles. The associations of Oriel are simply overwhelming, as Sir Walter Ealeigh, Bishop Butler, Keble the hymn-writer, Cardi- nal Newman, Dr. Arnold, Thomas Hughes, Bishop Wilber force, Matthew Arnold and his friend Arthur Clough were all Oriel men. "A cloud of witnesses whose influence upon the 224 STORIED WINDOWS world is too great for one mind to grasp," as Miss Cassandra expresses it. The dear lady has a question which she hopes to have an- swered by some of the learned ones at the Bod- leian. She has heard that President Lincoln's Gettysburg address is used at Oxford, as aai example of vigorous and terse English, and she wishes to know just how and when it is so used. This seems wonderful, almost beyond belief, at a seat of learning where a "well of English undefyled" has flowed from Dan Chaucer's time to our own. Dr. Mclvor is disposed to doubt the fact altogether, but Miss Cassandra's authority is a good one and she will solve the problem, if it can be done by mortal woman. At the Bodleian Dr. Mclvor showed us a number of manuscripts, among them the orig- inal of the Eubdlydt of Omar Khayyam, the earliest known manuscript of Omar Khayyam, written A.D. 1460, and the one used by Edward Fitzgerald in his translation, or adaptation, or whatever you may call his presentation of that beautiful, haunting poem. We also saw an Abyssinian manuscript, with a story very much like the English St. George and the Dragon. It is illustrated and the patron saint of Eng- land looked rather odd with Ethiopian features. Most interesting of all, and most curious, was 15 225 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON a fragment of a letter, in one of the cases, from a Greek boy to his father, dating back to the second or third century A.D., I really for- get which. As the letter was translated I give it to you: " Theon, to his father Theon greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me to Alexandria. * * * Mother said to Archelaus, ' It quite upsets him to be left behind.' Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink. There now! * * Is n't it human? as if a boy's hand had been reached out from that far-off land and age to clasp ours! Dr. Mclvor had seen the letter before, but he was evidently much touched by it, and was pleased to see that we felt as he did. Miss Cassandra's eyes filled with tears. She is such a sympathetic, emotional dear; and Angela turned her head away suspiciously and said, that she hoped that poor boy did get his "lyre." After our "strenuous morning," as Angela calls it, we spent the afternoon punting on the Isis until five o'clock, when we drove down to take tea with Miss Cassandra's friend. The entire party was invited, including the children to their great joy, so we all donned our "best bibs and tuckers" and set forth. It seems that to be Miss Cassandra's friend is also to be "I' ami de ses amis/' as we met with the warm- 226 STORIED WINDOWS est of welcomes and spent an hour with agree- able people upon a beautiful lawn. The hostess is an American, who lives at Oxford, and some English Friends were of the party, intelligent people whom it was a great pleasure to meet. I was impressed, as I have often been before, with the frankness of the English. Something was said about there being no women's college at Oxford, upon which our hostess reminded us that there are six halls for women here which we should see. I said that I had seen Nuneham and should like to see Girton. "Thee would be disappointed in Girton," said one of the guests, "if thee is familiar with Wellesley and Bryn Mawr Colleges in Amer- ica. Girton does not compare with Wellesley in the beauty of its surroundings, and the buildings and grounds of Bryn Mawr are much finer. ' ' Now, was not that very frank? The speaker did not make this admission as if he had ex- pected to be contradicted and flattered, and he was evidently pleased when Miss Cassandra and our hostess agreed with him. We had an animated discussion, over our tea, about co- education and the higher education of women which was so like a talk upon the same subjects 227 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON at home that we forgot for the moment that we were not in the ''States." Our one day in Oxford with Miss Cassandra and Dr. Mclvor was a brilliant success, and we parted from them both with infinite regret. August 20th. Angela says, that there are quite too many out-of-door attractions here to waste our time upon chapels and halls. She is more than half right and we are not attempting to do sight- seeing in any systematic way, as we have been here so often and hope to come again ; and then, as Hawthorne has well said, " it is a despair to see such a place for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily." This saying is really a com- fort to Walter and me, with Oxford's twenty- two colleges opening their doors to us, and we have compromised with Angela, beguiling her to some chapel or college in the morning, with the promise of spending the whole after- noon out of doors. Punting on the river is what she and the girls like best; but we some- times wander by the Cherwell near Christ Church meadows, or cross the bridge back of Magdalen and stroll through Addison's Walk, where the trees overarch and we look out upon 228 STORIED WINDOWS the river on one side and the deer park on the other. " Pleasant meanders shadowed with trees," as Anthony a Wood, an old historian of Oxford, called these " water walks," and "as delectahle as the banks of Erotas where Apollo himself was wont to walk and sing his lays." By one of the bridges over the Cherwell is a most picturesque old mill which has been modernized into a dwelling-house, and here are some beautiful black swans. You may believe that this is a very favorite spot, which Chris- tine and Lisa insist upon visiting at least once every day. From all of this you will gather that we are leading a perfectly rational and sensible life, and when we meet parties of tourists dragging themselves from hall to hall and from quad to quad, asking the name of this college and that, and forgetting it the next minute, we naturally congratulate ourselves that we are not like unto other tourists, even like unto those of Thomas Cook. There are, of course, certain old friends in one college or another that we must always see again, as the wonderful reredos at All Souls', with its many carved figures, and the beautiful Sir Joshua window in the chapel of New Col- 229 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON lege, with its Nativity, beneath which are the exquisite representations of the Christian vir- tues, the loveliest of them all being not Charity, but Hope, the perfect aspiring figure, whose feet barely touch the earth ; you surely remem- ber it. And then we seldom return from Christ's or Magdalen without stopping to see the Shelley memorial at University, that most exquisite youthful figure, which looks as if it had really been thrown upon a rock by the wild waves, beautiful as his own Adonais, and still like him, in death as in life, " a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely." We could stay on, from day to day and from week to week, finding each more inter- esting than the last, but Dr. Mclvor urged us not to keep Christine here long, reminding us of the old saying that ''Oxford possesses everything except climate." The weather is fairly good, and not as hot as when you and I were here in July, but we find it rather ener- vating after the bracing north country air, besides which the calendar admonishes us that we shall soon "have to take to the road again," as Angela says, if we are to have a fortnight in Devonshire and Cornwall. 230 STORIED WINDOWS Angela writes August 22nd. "Walter and Z. are off for the day, and as there may be no time for writing to-morrow I am finishing Z.'s letter. You must know, dear Margaret, that I am already practising the role of maiden aunt, and when I found that Z. was very anxious to look up a remote an- cestor by the name of Jones, who lived some- where within twenty miles of Oxford, I urged her to go with Walter and leave Christine and Lisa to my tender mercies. It seems to me something of a wild-goose chase as Joneses, like Smiths, are a trifle hard to locate, and this particular Jones family has long since dis- appeared from this part of the globe; but the house is said to be standing, and Z. hopes to get some of the furniture belonging to the family ; exactly how, I fail to see. Walter, who has a fine sense of humor, as you know, sug- gests a canvass of junk shops in a little town near Heldweal, the name of the county- seat. He is happy, of course, to go anywhere with Z. and the expedition has a flavor of adventure and the pursuit of something, no matter what, that always appeals to a man. This particular chase was suggested by a hatchment that we 231 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON saw hanging in one of the quads, with the iden- tical arms used by Z.'s American Joneses. I suppose the arms are usually alike, as most of them came from England in the first place ; and to tell you the truth, Margaret dear, there are so many of them here, in all the chapels, over the tombs and in memorial windows, that I am well sick of them. Miss Cassandra, who is a perfect dear and no end of fun, quite agrees with me. She says that ''in the inscriptions they generally begin quite piously with "To the Glory of God' and wind up with so much of the glorification of the man and his family that the Lord is quite lost sight of." As the M.D. left us yesterday, I do not need to be chaperoned and the children and I have had a day of perfect freedom together. Not a college or a chapel have we entered, not even a quad, except to go through the cloisters of Magdalen by the Founder's Tower to reach the old bridge, and the mill-pond where the black swans live. Such a lovely spot ! We took our books and work and spent the morning there, coming home a roundabout way by God- stow and Folly Bridge, where we engaged a boat for this afternoon. Of course we were punting on the Isis all the afternoon, which is quite the best thing to do here. 232 STORIED WINDOWS Having come in late for tea, I have sent Christine and Lisa to their room to read and rest their poor little legs while I write to you. We really walk much more than we realize in this curious place, where everything is too near to drive or take the tram, and so we go from quad to quad, and from one little winding street to another, and usually come out in some unexpected place. I must tell you now, while I think of it, that Z. has quite given over trying to cultivate my sentiment and all that, and is devoting all her energies to the children. This is really a great relief to me as I knew all the time that it was a hopeless task, and I doubt her having any better success with the girls. They are dears, sweet, perfectly all right, and ready to listen to everything that Z. tells them, but when she was anxious to impress them with the wonders of the world, at the Abbey and at the British Museum, and all the other places, I knew perfectly well that they would rather go to the Park to feed the swans or to Fuller's or Gunter's for afternoon tea, which they adore as they always pick out their own cakes. The M.D. suited Z. to a frac- tion, as he is simply chock full of sentiment, and spins off his impossible Scotch yarns by the yard. I know that I shocked him some- 233 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON times, but it is a good thing to let these foreign- ers see things from another point of view, as they are so set in their own opinions. Walter likes him, but, all the same, he is glad to take down his national pride a peg or two, and he looked at me in high glee when a nice English- man, who had been in "the States," compared Glrton to Bryn Mawr College, to the great advantage of the latter. I mean the build- ings and grounds, of course, and how sur- prised the M.D. was! I suppose he thinks we have nothing worth looking at in America. He had better come over and see. Z. and Walter have just returned, bearing their spoils with them, in the shape of a tea- pot without a spout, which Z. thought had the Jones arms on one side; but upon closer examination and upon comparing it with her water-color sketch, she finds that the animal on the crest is of a quite different species. I tell her that it won't make any difference if she puts it on a high shelf, and if she turns the broken spout to the wall it will look like an ancient vase. She was quite indignant, at first ; said she didn't care for make-believes, but I think she will accept my suggestion as the tea- pot is very pretty and has a lovely gilt handle with colors on it to match those in the arms. 234 STORIED WINDOWS There is so much make-believe in all this arms- and-crest business in America that a little bit, more or less, makes no difference. By the way, the present owners of Heldweal were out for the afternoon, so Z. did not see the inside of the house, which was quite too bad; but her natural ardor is not abated, and she will prob- ably "try, try again" the next time she comes to Oxford. I laugh at Z. and tease her, but after all her belief in people and things, and her joyous outlook upon life, are to be envied. Walter and I love her all the more for her little incon- sequent ways; but we must get some fun out of them, or life would not be worth living. We had hoped to stay here until next week, but Christine seems to be losing color and strength, the M.D.'s last orders were not to keep her long in Oxford, so Z. decided quite suddenly this evening to "take to the road to-morrow." Our first plan was to go directly to Minehead or Lynton, but Walter has been talking to our host, who tells him that we will have to stage part of the journey, as the rail- road does not run all the way to these places, and as we have a lot of luggage this compli- cates the situation. After looking over maps and routes, we have pretty well made up our 235 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON minds to go to Ilfracombe for Sunday, and coach from there to Lynton. In this way we shall have several hours at Bath, and when Z. suddenly realized how near Glastonbury is to Bath, her eyes danced in a way that you and I know of old. "Glastonbury," she exclaimed, "how I should love to see it!" It is the very starting place of religion in England. "There is no reason, dear, why we should not go to Glastonbury for a day, ' ' said Walter. "And every reason why you should," said I. "But there is no use in dragging Christine and Lisa there. They are not old enough to care for the beginnings of religion or of anything else except the beginning of a good time." Then I had a brilliant maiden- aunt idea, which is to have Z. and Wal- ter leave us at Bath and make their trip to Glastonbury, while I take the children to Ilfracombe, where they can meet us Saturday night or Sunday. They demurred at first but I think they will yield to my per- suasions and I shall come off with flying colors, as a first-class caretaker, while the two Honey- mooners go off on a journey into antiquity. It seems absurd to be changing all our plans on account of luggage, which is such a bother over here; and how tragic it is to see our 236 STORIED WINDOWS trunks, with all our worldly goods in them, started off on a van, with nothing on earth to show for them but two inches of paper with something scrawled on it that you can never quite make out! I generally lose mine, but although the "boxes" are often mislaid for a day, as mine were on the way to York, they generally "bob up serenely" sometime and somewhere. It never seems quite possible to lose them. A propos of trunks I must tell you about a pet bit of hand luggage that Z. insists upon carrying about with her. The only one of the really smart gowns belonging to her trousseau that she has with her is a perfect dream, in mauve cloth and chiffon, which she carries about with her in a big box, and for some rea- son, best known to herself, she will not let any one else touch the ark, as Walter and I call it. After wearing this costume in London for the first time at a garden party, and afterwards at a musical tea, we thought that Z. would be willing to put it in her trunk, but instead she appeared carrying the ark when we left Lon- don for Oxford. Just how it was overlooked I don't know, but after we were all comfortably settled in the boat at Wallingford, Z. exclaimed, ' ' My box ! What shall I do ? " Of course Wal- 237 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON ter begged or bribed the captain to wait until he ran back to The Lamb where we had lunched. When he appeared, a few minutes later hot and out of breath with the precious ark in his arms, I thought that like most men he would indulge in some sarcastic or disagree- able remarks, and had begun to look forward to the excitement of a lovers' quarrel, instead of which Walter placed the box alongside of Z., saying, "After this, dear, I shall have to take charge of the ark myself, as I was really afraid that I should never again have the pleas- ure of seeing you in that charming costume." If any one else had said that it would have been heaping coals of fire on poor Z.'s head, but with Walter's pleasant manner the words had no sting back of them. Isn't he a lamb? I suppose you will tell me that Allan is just such another; but I can assure you that the M.D. was a bit surprised. He looked several inter- rogation points at me, and when he had an opportunity he asked me whether ' l all American husbands were as amiable as Mr. Leonard?" I said yes, of course, with a few exceptions just to prove the rule, for which slight inac- curacy I hope I may be forgiven ! Z. had her innings when we went to take tea with Miss Cassandra, as she looked "perfectly 238 STORIED WINDOWS ripping," as the English girls say, in her res- cued gown. The children danced about her in delight, and Walter was so frankly proud of her appearance that I told him it was not quite comme il faut for a man to admire his own wife so much. My simple little Paris con- fection in greens and browns was quite thrown into the shade, although Z., who being on top, could afford to be generous, assured me that my costume was charming and very becoming. Miss Cassandra, who met us on the steps, held Z. at arm's length and turned her around, for all the world as if she had been a Dresden china shepherdess, exclaiming, "Thee should always wear that shade, my beauty bright, thee is so perfectly lovely in it ! " Now was not that refreshingly worldly? I really think that it is this dear Quaker lady's innocent worldliness that makes her so irresistible. X GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE THE GEORGE, GLASTONBURY, August 23rd. You will be wandering, dearest Margaret, how we happen to be in this old town; but perhaps Angela told you in her letter that she offered to take the children on to Ilfracombe, so I shall waste no time in making explanations, as I must give you the impressions of this per- fectly thrilling day, while everything is fresh in my mind. We came by way of Bath, a pleasant journey of about two hours from Oxford, through a level but not unattractive country, which re- minded us of Holland, by reason of its flatness and many small streams, some of them like canals or dykes. There being a stop over of several hours in Bath, for all of us, we had time to go through the Eoman baths, above ground and beneath. You and Allan are doubtless seeing the great baths in Eome, but even so, you could not fail 240 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE to be interested in this early Eoman trans- planting at Bath. The subterranean bathrooms are supplied with water by huge pipes and heated with blocks of hot iron, or by having a fire underneath the metal floor. The very com- fortable arrangements in the many private bathrooms made us realize, once more, what luxuries the Romans brought into Britain, such luxury as only the privileged few enjoy to-day, while among the Romans there were baths for all classes. Above the great swim- ming-pool, there is what they call a Roman terrace, or open gallery, which is adorned with colossal statues of Caesar, Hadrian, Suetonius, and many of "the great of old." Along the sides of this pool, and in many other places, are piled up bits of fine carving, broken columns and beautiful capitals which have been excavated within the last twenty years. Wal- ter was quite in his element among these Roman antiquities, and has been wishing for Dr. Mclvor to explain some things to him. When we passed into the Pump Room British associations overpowered the Roman, and An- gela and I wished for you in this place, where so many of our old friends in literature were wont to congregate. They tell us that this assembly-room is very little changed since the 1ft 241 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON days when Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Boswell, Horace Walpole, and all the great writers and talkers used to come here to drink from the queer little fountain and to gossip endlessly, as people were wont to do in those good old days, before railroads, telephones, and automobiles had quickened the pace of life from the gentle amble of Miss Austen's novels to the breakneck speed of our own time. Miss Burney came here with Queen Char- lotte, who held her court at Bath, and here again the authoress of Evelina came as Madame D'Arblay with a number of French emigres. Except for the Roman remains, and the Cathedral, this old city is interesting only from its associations, as it is little frequented to-day. A few persons were drinking the mineral water, which flows from a fountain presided over by the figure of an angel supposed to be made in the likeness of the one who stirred the waters of Bethesda. The water is served hot in glasses set in odd little basins. We amused ourselves seeing the other people make wry faces over their nauseous hot drink, and were not tempted to try it ourselves. The Cathedral, which is quite handsome, has a richly-carved west front, with ladders upon which a number of armless, legless, and some- 242 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE times wingless, stone angels are climbing. "Just like the angels in Jacob's Dream," Christine says, and as it happens this remark- able decoration was suggested by the dream of Bishop Oliver King, who rebuilt the Cathedral. The effect of these poor, maimed little angels, climbing up and down continually, is odd, and almost painful, as one feels sorry for their poor little tired legs. These angels really seem to have been furnished with legs at the begin- ning, but, like most of the carving of the Cathe- dral, much of the west front is broken and worn, either from the softness of the stone or the extreme dampness of the climate. Inside the Cathedral we found a number of interesting monuments, and inscriptions, among the latter one to Lady Waller, wife of the Par- liamentary General Waller, which is so odd, with its enigmatical play upon words, that Walter has copied it for you: " To the Deare Memory of the right virtuous and worthy Lady Jane, Lady Waller. In graces great in stature small, As full of spirit as void of gall, Cheerfully grave bounteously close Happy and yet from envy free Learned without pride, witty yet wise, Reader this riddle read for me Here the good Lady Waller lyes." 343 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON At the booking office in Bath Walter made inquiries about trains for our different routes, and found that we had been quite misinformed, as trains do run directly to Lynton. We have added another don't to our already quite long list. Don't trust your landlord ''however pleasant" but go to fountain head, the booking office or the Bradshaw. And even then "don't be any too sure," Walter adds. However, we are not disposed to quarrel with our host of the Grilling, as by changing our plans we have gained the inexpressible pleasure of a long afternoon in Glastonbury. Not knowing anything about accommoda- tions in this old town, we expected to go to Wells for the night, and spend Saturday in Glastonbury. But as luck would have it, we fell into conversation with an English lady en route, who told us of this George Inn, which she recommended highly. We are now doing the thing of all others which we longed to do, spending the night here and having a long afternoon and evening among the wonderful associations of this place, which is the only way to enjoy them. Could anything be more ap- propriate than to be stopping here at a pil- grims* inn? The George, which dates back to 1456, is on High Street near the Market 244 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE Cross and not far from the Abbey. Over the handsome carved gateway are the arms of Edward IV and those of the great Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul. The house is full of quaint nooks and corners, and in the cellar and dungeons beneath are more weird and grew- some relics of the old monastic life than we care to see. After the train left Shepton Mallet we had our first glimpse of the great tor, across green lowlands dotted with elms and beeches, where many sheep were grazing. A sudden curve in the road revealed the rounded Tor Hill, which rises so unexpectedly from the dead level of the plain that its appearance is almost start- ling. In its evenness and symmetry it suggests a fortress built by the primitive man for the protection of this fair valley, but upon a closer view we found that only the gray tower that crowns the tor is man-made. The hill itself is like a number of others in this neighborhood which rise abruptly from the level, as if thrown up by the action of subterranean forces, which, as Walter reminds me, is the usual method of making a hill. But there really is something about these tors quite different from ordinary hills. Walter calls them "bumps on the flat surface of the plain,'* which is not a bad de- 245 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON scription as they are so smooth and round, and as he says, "are quite unexpected, in which they also resemble bumps." Winding around and around, beside green meadows and silver streams, the train came suddenly into a little station which stands quite high and commands a view of the town of Glastonbury lying at the foot of the tower- crowned tor. This lovely valley, once an island and called "the mystic Isle of Avalon" from aval, Welsh for the apple which grew here spontaneously, is Tennyson's " Island valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly, but it lies, Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows, crowned with summer sea." Our great tor is called Tor Chalice, because here, according to many authorities, was buried the Holy Grail, which "Arimathean Joseph brought to Glastonbury," or as some of the old books call him, "Joseph of Abarimacie." On another tor not far away, called Weary- All Hill, was planted the winter thorn which blossoms at Christmas time. The main stalk of this tree was cut down by a Puritan fanatic ; 246 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE but a number of offshoots are to be found in different parts of the town, which they tell us still "blossom at Christmas, mindful of our Lord." The history of Glastonbury is so wound round and about with threads of religion, ro- mance, and tradition, and reaches back to such remote antiquity, that it is more difficult than in most places to know what to believe and what to reject. Indeed, I confess that I am rapidly reaching our Assisian point of view, and unless Walter holds me back by his saving common sense I shall end by believing every- thing that is told me. We found a little book at one of the shops which gives some links in a chain of evidence that seemed, at a first glance, purely mythical. The legend is that Joseph of Arimathea set forth from Palestine for Britain directly after the crucifixion of his Lord, bearing with him the sacred chalice. The journey of the holy pil- grims, for Joseph was attended by his son and some missionaries, twelve in all, has been traced step by step, and was by a route used be- fore the time of Joseph. By sea the pilgrims journeyed to Marseilles, thence to the ancient city of Aries, across Gaul, in thirty days, and 247 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON from Brittany across the Channel, in four days, to Cornwall, the ancient Lyonesse. It all seems quite reasonable, as the tin mines of Cornwall brought traders here from all parts of the known world. The story runs that Joseph of Arimathea brought some material and practical benefit to the Cornwall miners, as he taught them how "to extract the tin and purge it of its wolfram." Mr. Baring-Gould, in writing about Cornwall, speaks of a curious custom that has come down to later times. He says that "when the tin is flashed the tinner shouts, 'Joseph was in the tin trade!'" I give you the tale as it has come to us. We both thought of you and Allan, and wished for you, when we paid our material English sixpences at the little wicket entrance gate, and stood in the Abbey grounds surrounded by the vast ruins and the eloquent silences of centuries. There are ruins and ruins. You and I have seen many in Italy and in this England. The lovely ruins of the Priory of St. Augustine at Canterbury awed me by their beauty and an- tiquity, but here are the remains of a church whose foundations antedate the coming of Christianity to Kent, by several centuries. Whether or not we believe that St. Joseph built his church of wattles in the first century, St. 248 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE Patrick came to Glastonbury about the middle of the fifth and became its first abbot. No less authority than Professor Freeman wrote of this Abbey: "The ancient church of wood or wicker, which legend spoke of as the first temple reared on British soil to the honor of Christ, was preserved as a hallowed relic, even after a greater church of stone was built by Dunstan to the east of it. Nowhere else, among all the churches of England, can we find one that can trace up its uninterrupted being to days before the Teuton had set foot upon English soil. The legendary burial place of Arthur, the real burying place of Edgar and the two Edmunds, stands alone among English minsters as the one link which really does bind us to the ancient church of the Briton and the Roman." We walked around and through the beautiful ruin, with its nave almost as long as that of Winchester Cathedral, its transeptal chapels, its lofty arches partly Norman and partly Gothic, and altogether noble and inspiring, and its beautiful Lady-Chapel, which we left to the last, as the most perfect of all. This Lady- Chapel, which is also called the Chapel of St. Joseph, is built over the original church of wattles, the " VETUSTA ECCLESIA," and is rich 249 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON in carvings of saints, angels and armed knights, with flowers and leaves and birds and beasts interwoven between the figures. On the north door is the story of the Three Kings, the Massacre of the Innocents, and ever so many other Scripture scenes, all exquisitely carved in the stone. Over some of the arches there is Norman toothing, and over others graceful arabesque designs. It is so beautiful even in its ruinous state, that I can find no words in which to describe this Chapel, which Professor Freeman calls the " loveliest building that Glastonbury can show, the jewel of the Late Romanesque on a small scale." We have not met one American tourist here and only a few English people. It is strange that so few travellers find their way to Glaston- bury, when it is a place of so much beauty and interest, for, aside from its associations with the beginnings of Christianity in Great Britain, here it was, according to many an ancient tale, that King Arthur was buried. In "The High History of the Holy Grail" it is related that Lancelot came to this " rich, fair chapel," and asked whose were the "two coffins covered with polls," and that one of the hermits told him that Queen Guinevere lay in one, and the one beside her was for King Arthur as "the Queen 250 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE bade at her death that his body should be set beside her own when he shall end. Hereof have we the letters and her seal in this chapel, and this place made she be builded new on this wise or ever she died." The Abbot's Kitchen, an eight-sided building, most interesting in its architecture, with sub- stantial buttresses and a double turret or a lantern on top, lies south of the Abbey. This kitchen, which is in perfect preservation, was beside the great refectory where a generous hospitality was exercised by the Glastonbury brothers. After leaving the Abbey, we made our way through many streets to the foot of the great tor, whither we were conducted by a pretty lit- tle girl about Lisa's age, who took great pleasure in showing us the way through a hedge-bordered lane and a little gate. From Tor Chalice or Tor Hill there is a fine view of the Bristol channel, the Mendip Hills and Wells Cathedral, only five miles away, which we ex- pect to see to-morrow. In the gray tower, on top of the hill, which is really a pilgrims' chapel, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Eichard Whiting, was dragged on a hurdle and hanged, because, as Walter expresses it, "he could not make his churchmanship and morals square 251 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON with those of his royal master." It was this same royal master, Henry VIII, who despoiled the Abbey of its treasures and destroyed so much of its beauty. Our little guide, who was most friendly, waited for us, followed us down the steep hill-side, and even after we had given her some pennies refused to desert us until she had started us upon the shortest route to the George. Part of our way lay by a hill-side street, after which we turned into what is evi- dently the Petticoat Lane of Glastonbury. A very poor little street it is, with wretched- looking people about the door-ways; and yet here, as everywhere in rural England, many flowers, gorgeous fuchsias and geraniums, were blooming in the small front yards, and through the open doors of the miserable houses we could see tidy little kitchen gardens beyond. At the corner of Beere Lane and Chilkwell Street we passed the Abbey barn, which is of great size, cruciform, with symbolic carvings over the windows and doors. Over the great entrance is the winged ox of Saint Mark, which seems a particularly appropriate decoration for a barn. At the George they very considerately serve dinner at a late hour, and after what seemed like a whole evening on the tor, and along Chilk- 252 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE well Street, we still had time to make some changes in our costume before going in to din- ner. From an afternoon spent entirely in the past, filled with associations of St. Joseph and the good brothers of the Abbey, the transition to a well-lighted dining-room, and a flower- bedecked table with handsome modern appoint- ments, was something of a surprise to us. As if to accentuate the modern note in this ancient hostelry, we were told that it had been restored and modernized, in consequence of the many auto-tourists who come this way from Torquay, Penzance, and other points upon the coast. We were quite hungry enough, after our long walk, to enjoy the excellent dinner that was served us. At the table were several parties of Eng- lish people, among them a handsome dark-eyed bride who seemed as eager to know all about Glastonbury as we were. Walter had the pleasure of sitting next to this lady, whose name we do not know and may never know, but she and her husband will always stand for us as types of the very best English people, of the sort that one is more likely to meet on the continent that at home. They were intelligent, courteous, and " perfectly all right," as Walter says, "like the very best sort of Americans!" I fancy that the best sort are much alike the world over. 253 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Opposite to us were "Dr. and Mrs. Proudie" in the flesh, the lady in quite a considerable amount of it, the gentleman smaller and much milder in appearance that Tro Hope's bishop, but, like him, somewhat obscured by his wife's robust and commanding personality. The ar- rangement of Mrs. Proudie's hair was of an ingenuity and hideousness that made me long to have Angela at hand to make a sketch of it for you. A flat band of the back hair, which is iron gray, was brought forward to do duty above the massive domelike brow of the lady, making a severe frame for a face of uncompro- mising stolidity. What happened in the back did not transpire, as a friendly cap covered all deficiencies. After Mrs. Proudie had left the table the bride, with whom we had already exchanged some civilities, remarked in the tone in which some people repeat the litany, "If ever I lose my front hair, I trust that I shall never be tempted to do that ! ' ' "Do what?" asked Walter. " 'Bob Peter to pay Paul'?" This simile so amused the young couple, that we were soon chatting away together quite merrily. When I heard the English gentleman telling Walter that an ancient lake village had 254 been discovered near Glastonbury, within a few years, and that a number of interesting articles that had been excavated were to be found in a museum around the corner, I began to tremble for my chance of seeing Wells Cathedral to-morrow. "We shall have to make an early start," I said, "in order to see the museum before we take the train for Wells." "The museum does not open until ten o'clock," said the bride, as if that quite settled the matter. "We shall have to ask them to open it an hour earlier," said Walter, at which the bride and groom looked at us in surprise, as if we belonged to a different species, or had proposed to make some change in the Prayer Book. These dear, good English people seem to think that things must continue as they are, because they have lasted so long according to an estab- lished order. We afterward met "Dr. and Mrs. Proudie" in the drawing-room. The latter proved to be an amiable giantess, must addicted to knitting. By some curious anachronism, this ancient couple had come to Glastonbury in an automo- bile, in which modern vehicle they are exploring many resorts on the Devonshire coast. "Dr. 255 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Proudie" gave us valuable information with regard to Minehead, Tintagel, and other places, and quite won Walter's affections by telling him of Eoman and British camps near Lynton and Brendon. TAUNTON, August 24th. I am writing you a line, while we wait for our train at this place, which does not appear to be particularly interesting although it has an eighth-century castle, and its Archaeological Museum, which Walter is now exploring, may contain treasure untold. A propos of museums you may be interested to know that we accomplished our purpose this morning. Walter inquired the way to the jani- tor's house, and found him ready and willing to open his museum for us at any time that suited us. I was sitting on the museum steps waiting for him, when the bride and groom appeared. They looked amused, of course, and decidedly incredulous; but "he laughs best who laughs last," and my turn came when Walter, and the janitor with the keys, emerged from the arch of the Eed Lion Inn near by. There are quite a number of interesting ar- ticles in this collection, some implements of husbandry, and hammers and saws, but I was most interested in some finely decorated pot- 256 GLASTONBURY'S SHRINE tery, which looked as if it might have come from Egypt or Assyria, and in a handsome bronze bowl, with a repousse design upon the sides. We enjoyed our short journey to Wells with our new acquaintances and went through the Cathedral with them. They will, I am sure, always speak of us as those enterprising Americans. Here comes Walter to warn me that our train starts in fifteen minutes, which gives me no time to tell you of the beauty of Wells Cathedral, which is one of the most interesting archi- tecturally that we have seen, with its richly- decorated west front and its Chapter House connected by a curious gallery or bridge with the Vicar's close. The close itself is a lovely spot, where there are charming little cottages in which the students of the Theological Col- lege live in term time. We have picked out one which we will occupy when we come here to spend "a week away from time." Wells is a place where one should live, in order to appre- ciate all the beauty of detail in the Cathedral, where the clustered columns, carvings, gar- goyles and fan vaultings are exquisite. The surroundings, too, are most alluring, for here is a lovely garden with an embattled wall and 17 257 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON an ancient moat. "We have seen so many dried- up moats, bridged over and "off duty," as Walter says, that it is a satisfaction to see one with water in it. Upon this moat, under the shadow of the castle wall, swans are floating which are so intelligent that they pull a bell- rope when they want their dinner. This bell- rope, which connects in some way with the kitchen, the swans were pulling when we walked by the moat. I am mailing this letter here, and will write you again from Ilfracombe. We heard from Archie, before we left Oxford. He tells us he has extended his vacation, in order to have a week in Vienna with some M.D. 's, and now holds out a prospect of meeting us in Paris in September. XI 'THE LAND OF LOHNA DOONE" ILFRACOMBE, Sunday, August 25th. IT was quite late when we reached Ilfracombe last night and after driving up a long steep hill to a hotel on the cliffs, to which we had wired for rooms, we found a note from Angela saying there were no accommodations to be had in this most desirable place. With much reluctance we left this pleasantly-situated inn with its queer name, the Cliff Hydro, and drove down into the town to an address that Angela had left for us. Here our three graces were anxiously awaiting us, the girls full of their doings with Angela, driving, walking, and hav- ing tea at a little cottage upon the rocks, after- noon tea being an important part of the day's amusements. This place is all up and down hill, the streets being as steep as those at Glastonbury. You would have been amused if you had seen us going to church this morning, winding round and round the hill-side paths to a quite large 259 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON church on the tip top, which was so full that it was with difficulty that we found seats. These good church-goers are most of them hard- working people, clerks, and small shopkeepers, who have come here for their summer vacation as Ilfracombe abounds in cheap boarding- houses. At the Casino and its garden, last night, we were reminded of Atlantic City and Asbury Park, so great was the crowd of pleas- ure-seekers and so varied the amusements offered them. Ilfracombe has much natural beauty, like all of the resorts on the Devonshire coast, with its bold headlands reaching out into the sea and its picturesque Tors Walk, which is the fashion- able promenade of the town. They seem to call all their hills "tors" here, but none of them is equal to our Tor Chalice at Glastonbury, to which my thoughts turn back with real affection, as to something that I have known and loved for years. We are glad to see this place, as we have heard so much of it, and for another and less flattering reason, which is that we may in future avoid it in this crowded holiday season. After our mid-day dinner, we held a council of war with regard to our next move, as Angela is out of sorts with this place, and we are none 260 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" of us particularly charmed with it, especially as the people in the hotel seem to have an objection to Americans, and treat us, as she says, like * ' Jews, infidels and heretics. " " Why try another Devonshire sea-side place?" she asks. "They will all be crowded like Ilfra- combe. ' ' This is not at all like Angela, as you know that she is usually eager to see new places, and thinks each one more delightful than the last. "What has come over her! She is so variable, in the gayest mood one moment and quite dull and spiritless the next. When I said something to Walter about this, and wondered whether Angela was missing Ludovico, who she tells me went with the Haldanes all the way to Carls- bad, and stopped there for a week, he laughed and said, "How about the long-legged Scotch- man? He is the suitor who would have my sympathy, if I happened to be, like you, in the match-making line." "Dr. Mclvor!" I exclaimed. "Of course he admires Angela, but he would never do for her." "Why not, Zelphine?" "Oh, because he is so plain looking with his sandy hair and his school-boy ways." "Ian Mclvor may not be an Adonis; but he 261 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON is a manly fellow with plenty of brains, and are only the handsome and well favored to be beloved, oh my Zelphine?" Walter asked this absurd question with such a comical expression in his handsome eyes, that I could not help laughing, and so had to forgive him for calling me a match-maker. My reason was rather an absurd one I admit, but I fancy that I am spoiled, having so many good-looking men in my own family and then no one, even Ludovico himself, seems quite good enough for Angela. To return to our discussion, Angela says, "Why not go directly to Cornwall and see Tintagel and some of the places down there?" Much as I wish to see Lynton I was almost ready to yield to Angela's suggestion, as it has been raining since luncheon and you know that nothing so completely takes the life and spirit out of me as dull rainy weather, but fortunately Walter came to my rescue. Although I know that his own inclinations draw him strongly toward Tintagel and King Arthur's castle, of which Dr. Mclvor has told him so much, he says that the weather will probably be more stormy in Cornwall and that Lynton is the place of all others that we should see. So to Lynton we go to-morrow. 262 THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" MONDAY, August 26th. I am finishing my letter, dear Margaret, while we are waiting for luncheon. Our lug- gage is already in the hall, as we take an early afternoon train for Lynton. This morning Walter had a note from Dr. Mclvor, asking him to wire him at once, as he wishes to join us at our next stopping place. As it has been raining all morning, we have spent our time in small shops looking over post- cards, which the children delight in, of course. Angela is interested in everything and is quite her old self to-day. She has changed her mind and is very anxious to go to Lynton. August 27th. The ideal route from Ilfracombe to Lynton is by coach through Watermouth, Combe Martin, whose ancient battlemented church, with its beautiful perpendicular tower, is well worth a visit, by Trentishoe and Hunter's Inn, which is only one mile from the sea, and on, skirting the sea all the way, by Wooda Bay and Lee Abbey to the Valley of Eocks, which is a short walk from the principal hotels of Lynton. As the rain was pouring in torrents when we left Ilfracombe, and not being, like the English, 263 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON addicted to coaching in "soft weather," we journeyed by rail via Barnstaple, where we, of course, changed cars, as through trains do not prevail in this part of England. By the time we reached Barnstaple, or Barum as they call it here, the sun was shining gloriously, lighting up the Taw until its broad expanse of tide water shone like a silver lake. The journey of nine- teen miles or more, from Barnstaple Junction to Lynton, was made slowly over a narrow- gauge railway, which gave us time to enjoy the beauty of sea and shore. On both sides of the road the moors reach off into space, with charm- ing bits of woodland nestling down in the val- leys, and hedges, hedges everywhere and never a fence to be seen. After passing Blackmoor and crossing the Heddon, a sudden ascent brought the sea in full view at Wooda Bay, while to the right there stretched before us, like another sea, the seem- ingly boundless expanse of Exmoor, mysterious with the mystery of the moors. Why the moors are mysterious and awesome I know not ; but we all felt it; even Angela, who could laugh and chatter merrily among the most thrilling asso- ciations of Rome, was awed into silence by the vast reaches of Exmoor over which the evening shadows were gathering. Nor was it because 264 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" we were thinking of the Doones who had once made this region so terrible, as we failed to associate Barnstaple and Lynton with the fa- mous outlaw band until some people in the rail- way coach began to talk about their outrages in this neighborhood, with all the realism and detail in which country people seem to delight. One of the party, a stout woman with a kindly face, dwelt with harrowing minuteness upon the carrying off of fair Margery Babcock from her husband's farm at Martinhoe near by, and the cruel murder of her baby. "I Ve heard my gran'fayther tell on it many's the time," said the narrator, pausing for breath. " The Doones, devils I call 'em, being in a great taking 'cause they found but poor victuals in the larder, began to play loriot with the poor babe. The serving maid, lying hid under a fagot of wood in the bake-oven, heard them sing in their rage, as they tossed the child before the fire : If any man asketh who killed thee, Say 'twas the Doones of Badgeworthy. The last word the good dame pronounced "Badgery," thus making even the lines of the cruel couplet. "And the poor wench (my gran'fayther knew 265 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON her gran 'son) was lying there afraid to breathe for fear she might let out a hiccough, she be- ing subject to them, and they find her and carry her off after her mistress that was carried away by Carver Doone himself. Folks around here blamed Honor Jose, that was her name, but my gran'fayther would hear naught of blame for the poor wench. He always stuck to it and said she could never have saved the baby, and life 's life, and honor 's honor, that being her name, too, and both would have gone down be- fore those bold, bad men. But the miseries of Kit Babcock, "who was clean dazed with sorrow for his sweet Mistress Margery, and the babe, as much a martyr as the babes we have church service for on a Holy Innocents' Day, roused up the whole countryside. No man hereabouts rested until they had scotched the vipers in their own nest and set it afire, and drove them out to meet our men in the open. Jan Snell, Honor's young man, was foremost in the posse, and the story is that he had the satisfaction of laying low one of the very men that came to Kit Babcock 's cottage. Honor would never hear a word of marryin' till he came back and told her that. Ofttimes, when her own baby was lyin* on her breast, she must have thought of that poor murdered babe. They say she heard 266 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" its cries in her sleep, at night, till her own baby came to comfort her." The farmer's wife had fortunately reached the end of her tale by the time our train drew up at the terminus, otherwise we could never have left her. As it was, the girls followed her, helped her with her parcels and did not quit her side until they saw her safely tucked into the rude little cart in which her spouse had come to meet her. When the good dame drove off, looking like a motherly Kris Kringle, her face bubbling over with fatness and good nature, as she sat smil- ing at us above her hundred and one boxes and parcels, we made our way to the char d banes that were waiting to take passengers to Lynton. As the station stands very high, the road to Lynton is chiefly down hill. At the foot of one of the longest of these Devonshire hills, we came upon the lovely little town of Lynmouth. Its one street follows the windings of the East and West Lyns, which here unite their waters and run swiftly to the sea over a rocky bed and between well wooded shores, "the rivers and the sea," as Southey says, making "but one sound of uproar." Although Lynton stands four hundred feet above Lynmouth, it is not easy to say where 267 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON one town ends and the other begins, as the Lynmouth houses climb up the hill above the valley, and those of Lynton reach down the steep cliff to meet them. Yet each place has its own individual charm. If Lynmouth is quaint and picturesque, with its thatched cot- tages embowered in vines, its old stone walls and small pier upon which an ancient tower stands, as if to guard the peaceful harbor, Lyn- ton has a beauty of its own in rugged cliffs and bold headlands reaching out into the sea. After establishing ourselves in our rooms, there was barely time before dinner to visit the Valley of Rocks, which is overshadowed by the huge uplifted crag of Castle Eock with the Devil's Cheese-ring standing close beside it. Southey, in describing this wonderful gap in the hillside, which seems to have been cleft asunder by giant forces, speaks of these great boulders and bare ridges of rock as "the very^ bones and skeleton of the earth," and of the vast pile of Castle Eock as worthy to have been a palace of the pre- Adamite kings or a city of the Anakim, in its shapeless grandeur. The Valley of Eocks, called by the Exmoor folk the "Danes" or the "Denes," which is one of their words for a hollow place like a den, was the winter home of "Mother Melldrum, the wise 268 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" woman of Simonsbath, " whom John Eidd vis- ited in her lair, and questioned about his next meeting with Lorna Doone. Under the shadow of the great rock, in the darkening evening light, it was not difficult to picture the weird scene described by Blackmore. The wrinkled old face, with its bright, shining eyes, the up- lifted hand, pointing to the narrow shelf of rock, where a poor fat sheep was overcome by a wolfish black goat, the resounding voice cry- ing, "Have naught to do with any Doone, John Eidd; mark the end of it!'* The end of it being that the poor sheep was thrown from the crag into the sea before John Eidd could reach it, while he, frightened as he was by the scene, the hour and the dismal prophecy of the "fear- ful woman," still plucked up heart of grace to believe that he might in the end win his Lorna. When we reluctantly quitted the "Denes," from whose gray rocks the afterglow had faded, "we vowed that we would spend every sunset in this wonderful valley; but the morning light and Walter's conversations with the several drivers have revealed so many delightful places to explore that it now looks as if we should be coaching and junketing every hour of our stay at Lynton. One day we are to drive to the Hunter's Inn, 269 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON which is in a valley of heather and furze, near the sea. Another drive will be to Simonsbath in the very heart of the Exmoor forest, and still another drive or walk will be to Lee Abbey, the ancient home of the ill-starred family of De Wichehalse, all of whom perished in this beau- tiful, cruel bay. These are only a few of the many places in the neighborhood well worth visiting, and yet Lynton itself is beautiful enough to hold us fast by its own charms. I am writing on a delightful balcony which overhangs the cliff. We look down upon many hill-side gardens which are as lovely as those of Italy. Four hundred feet below us are Lynmouth and the two babbling Lyns, while beyond, as far as the eye can reach, is the sea, or rather, the Bristol Channel, and toward the north the line of the Welsh hills, faint and cloudlike in the distance. Angela and I would be content to spend the best part of the day on this lovely balcony, reading, talking," and writing to you; but Walter urges us to make the most of the fine weather for an ex- cursion to the Doone Valley, a drive of ten miles or more. On cloudy and rainy days he is plan- ning to fish with Dr. Mclvor in the Oare Water or in the Barle, as trout abound in all of these mountain streams. 270 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" August 28th. Yesterday afternoon our road lay by the East Lyn, and on by that lovely glen, the Waters- meet, in which two rushing streams throw them- selves into each other's arms, and go singing on their way to Lynmouth and the sea. Much of our drive was by Brendon Water, which separates Devonshire from Somerset. At Bren- don, the old bridge, overhung with trees and vines, is so picturesque that Angela and Lisa begged the driver to stop long enough to allow them to take a picture of it, while we strolled along the road- side and thought how easily the Doones could have hid themselves in the thick undergrowth while lying in wait for unwary travellers. We began to read Lorna Doone to the girls last night, and Christine thought she had found the very "little gullet by a barrow of heather" in which John Eidd and the timor- ous John Fry hid themselves while the Doones passed by, but the driver disturbed her pleasant fancy by telling her that Dunkery Beacon was over toward Porlock, and not in our route for this afternoon. We drove for some distance along the edge of the moor and through gates into the ancient forest. Gates seem quite out of keeping with 271 the wildness of Exmoor, and are probably to keep the deer, which still abound in this region, from wandering far afield. Malmsmead, where are the buildings that constitute what is now called the Doone farm, is a most peaceful valley, with low hills rising above it and a lovely mountain stream winding through it, over which is a fine double-arched stone bridge. Here we were glad to climb down from our high seats on the coach and refresh ourselves with some bread and jam, and some very poor tea, before beginning our long walk through the Badgeworthy Glen to the strong- hold of the Doones. The first part of the route was easy walking, through narrow hedge-bordered lanes and over trickling streamlets, until we began to ascend the famous Waterslide, which seems a much less formidable stream now than the one up which little John Eidd struggled so painfully in search of the much prized "loaches." The walk was longer than we had been told, and as the roughest part still lay before us, Walter begged us to linger by the stream or stroll back slowly toward the farm, while he pushed on with some Englishmen who had come from Lynton in another coach. The drive and the walk are really too much 272 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" for an afternoon, and we are promising our- selves the pleasure of coming again for a whole day, as Walter reports the Doone stronghold most interesting. The foundations of some of the huts are still to be seen, and although the entrance is not defended, as Blackmore described it, by "a fence of sheer rock and rough arches, jagged, black and terrible," this side-valley, shut in by bleak moorland hills, is quite weird enough to excite "an imagination less active than Zelphine's." The last words, in quotes, as you may notice, are Walter's, who claims that I have a monopoly of this faculty to the exclusion of the rest of the family. We drove home by another route, stopping at Oare church where Lorna and John were mar- ried. As it stands to-day, the church is quaint and interesting, although considerably enlarged and disappointingly modern in some of its ap- pointments. A heavy arch or screen of dark wood separates the newer part of the building from the tiny chapel, before whose altar John Kidd and Lorna stood when the sound of a shot followed the parson's blessing, and the bride in her bright beauty fell bleeding at her hus- band's feet. The little girls were so excited by our talk of the tragic wedding that we had to explain to 18 273 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON them that the valiant John pursued his enemy, Carver Doone, overcame him, and had the satis- faction of seeing him sink into the black bog of the Wizard's Slough near by. "And the bride, did she get alive again?" asked Lisa, knowing well that a story has no right to end in sorrow. "Yes," said Walter, gravely, "which was less difficult as she was not at any time really dead, although her wedding dress was quite ruined, and she was never able to wear it at family parties; but John bought her another dress quite as good, and they lived ever after in great happiness and peace, with never a Doone in all the country to molest or make them afraid." The drive home by Countisbury, with the Sillery Sands and the sea, on one side, and the downs, purple with heather, on the other, was so delightful that we were loath to quit the head- land road and descend the long hill to Lyn- mouth. Here the driver insisted upon dumping us, explaining with perfect satisfaction to him- self, if not to us, that the Lynton hill was quite too steep for his horses with so heavy a load, and that it was customary for travellers to use the lift. We naturally scorned the lift as an inglorious 274 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" way of ending an afternoon of ideal beauty and charm, and slowly made our way up the steep hill-side by the pretty vine-covered cottage where Shelley and his Harriet lived for a short time after their return from Ireland. By the time we reached the top of the hill the western sky was brilliant in an afterglow of crimson and gold, while the vast mass of Castle Rock, in the shadow, stood out dark, rugged and menacing, like the fortress of a rob- ber chieftain, or the very fastness of the Doones themselves. August 29th. Dr. Mclvor appeared early this morning. How he came we do not know, as there was no train arriving about that time. He probably walked part of the way, as he is a famous walker. I was upstairs ; but Angela and Chris- tine happened to be in the hall, and when we came downstairs we found them, all three, wait- ing to go into breakfast with us. Angela is really treating the Doctor quite civilly, and has gone with him to explore the Valley of Rocks, very discreetly taking the children with her. We are planning to have a whole day to-morrow in Dooneland, where Walter and the Doctor are hoping to have some fishing in the Badgeworthy or in one of the other waters thereabout. 275 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Walter carried the Doctor off to a sale of ponies to-day, which is one of the excitements of this region. This is really much more inter- esting than an ordinary sale, as the sturdy lit- tle creatures which are running wild are bought "on the hoof," if I may so express it, and, quite the reverse of Mrs. Glass's ''hare," you buy your pony first and then catch it. I stopped writing to go with Angela and the girls to the Watersmeet, where we spent the whole morning. Angela is making a water- color sketch of a little nook she is very fond of, where the shade is dense and the birches lean over the rushing Lyn until their branches dip into the water. Our two men have just returned from the sale, and what do you think they have brought back with them? Two ponies; Walter caught one and Dr. Mclvor the other. They are the dearest shaggy little creatures, and so love their moorland freedom that they cry like children when they are first put into harness. Dr. Mclvor has bestowed his prize upon Christine, and Lisa has adopted the other one. I really think that Walter had no idea of taking his pony home when he caught it, and was only thinking of the sport; but the children have simply fallen in love with the dear little crea- 276 "THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE" tares, and I cannot blame them, as they are perfect dears, and I love them myself ; but how shall we ever get them home 1 Walter will have to manage it in some way. I am glad that this added responsibility is not mine, which Angela says is "a very undutiful speech from a helpmeet. ' ' September 2nd. After a week's stay in Lynton we are by no means ready to leave it. In addition to the beauty of its bold headlands and peaceful val- leys, we have revelled in certain creature com- forts not to be despised by a good traveller. In view of all that we have enjoyed at this inn, we bestowed our tips upon the numerous attendants with real pleasure; indeed Angela, with royal generosity, handed the porter a purse just before we drove away, greatly to the Doctor's amusement, who asked if this was an American custom. The man seemed charmed with Angela's graceful gift, although she explained that the purse was an old one that she had intended to throw away, and that it only contained small pieces of silver and cop- pers. These Devonshire people are simple- hearted folk, easily pleased, and will, I am sure, always think of Angela as a princess from fairyland. 277 XII DUNDAGEL BY THE CORNISH SEA BIDEFORD, September 4th. Two days we have spent here in search of Kingsley associations. This morning we drove to the little town of Westward Ho to visit the house, now an inn, in which a part of the novel Westward Ho! was written. This afternoon we went to the Royal Hotel, here in Bideford, which is the one Kingsley described as the home of Rose Saltern's father, and in the large drawing-room the novelist wrote the first chap- ters of his romance. This room has a stucco ceiling, decorated with garlands of fruits, flow- ers and birds, all delicately tinted, artists having been brought from Italy for the purpose by the merchant prince who lived in this house in the time of Sir Francis Drake. The effect is rich and handsome, odd as it may seem. Yesterday we had one golden day at Clovelly. Here we found ourselves in the very heart of Kingsleyland, for near Clovelly Court is the 278 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA little church of which the elder Kingsley was rector during the boyhood and youth of the novelist. The genius of Charles Kingsley seems to have owed a lasting debt to the rugged and picturesque beauty of the Devonshire coast, which he acknowledged to his wife when he brought her here in later years. "Now that you have seen Clovelly," he said, "you know what was the inspiration of my life before I met you." Dear little Clovelly, with its one precipitous Btreet rising sharply from the sea, is like a bit of Italy set down in green England. It is so lovely, with its cottages embowered in vines, its fuchsia trees gay with blossoms, and its Hobby Drive from which we had incomparable glimpses of sea and shore, that it deserves a whole letter to itself, which Angela will doubt- less write you, as she has quite lost her heart to Clovelly. THE WELLINGTON, BOSCASTLE, September 5th. We came here to-day from Bideford by a most roundabout route through Yeoford, Oke- hampton, and Launceston, to Camelford. The journey between Okehampton and Launceston was on the edge of Dartmoor, and the vast 279 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON reaches of moorland were quite beyond any- thing that we have seen further north. Camelford is the ancient Camelot where King Arthur fought his last fatal battle with his faithless kinsman, Modred. We were glad that there was no time to spend at this place, as they show here a spot which they call King Arthur's grave, and having seen the place where he and Queen Guinevere were buried at Glastonbury we distinctly object to being shown another grave of King Arthur. A pleasant moorland drive, of four or rive miles, brought us to the good inn where we are stopping. We have established ourselves at Boscastle instead of at Trevenna, and for the most mun- dane of reasons, the good repute of the inn here. A charming compatriot, whom we met at Bide- ford, recommended the Wellington, saying that she sometimes trusted to Providence in the choice of inns, and sometimes to Baedeker, and in the latter case she always rued the day. Following the leadings of this stranger guide, we are living in the greatest comfort in this charmingly picturesque place, and find to our amusement that in the case of this particular inn Providence and Baedeker are of one mind. Everything about this house is English of 280 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA the better sort, from the magnificent pitcher in the shape of a swan that adorns my wash- hand-stand to the afternoon tea-table, where Devonshire cream flows as freely as the milk and honey of the promised land of Israel. On our drive over from Camelford, Walter, for the sake of saying something to the driver, from whom he says he generally learns more than from the London Times, asked whether he should find Devonshire cream at Boscastle. You would have laughed if you could have seen the shake of the head and the lift of the shoulders with which this loyal son of Corn- wall emphasized his contempt for the products of an adjoining county. "No, Cornish cream," was the curt reply. We all laughed, and the man, with a comfortable sense of having the best of the situation, became quite loquacious, pointing out to us places of interest that we passed, flourishing his whip with pride toward Brown Willa, the highest hill in Cornwall, toward Willa Park Point, which bold headland is crowned with a tiny white observatory, and toward the new hotel at Trevenna, a substantial castellated building, which to the bucolic mind is of far more importance than the ruins of King Arthur's castle near by. The afternoon was so perfect that we were 281 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON tempted out for a walk by an enticing headland path, which follows the windings of the tortuous Boscastle harbor, to a seat high above the sea, from which we had a fine view of the sun set- ting behind the great boulders of Tintagel Head. Beyond lies King Arthur's castle, "Dundagel by the Cornish sea," a realm of mystery and romance which we shall soon explore. September 6th. This has been heaven's own day for beauty of sea, shore, and sky. I need not tell you that we have spent the greater part of it in walking through the one street of Trevenna, or Tintagel as they seem to call it now, a graceful concession to the importance of the castle of Dundagel or Tintagel, which dominates the whole region hereabouts. Nearly all the build- ings of the little hamlet are quaint and pictur- esque. The village post-office is especially charming with its moss-grown eaves and many peaks, gables and chimneys. Angela was much more successful in getting a picture of this building than of the castle. The vastness of the ruin and the irregularity of the foundations, a part on the mainland and the larger portion upon a wild craggy headland reaching out into the sea, made it quite impossible to include the whole on one film. 282 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA After securing the key of the castle, which we found, as directed by our guide-book, at the little refreshment house in the valley, we crossed a narrow path over a chasm three hun- dred feet deep and climbed up many rock-hewn steps to the iron door that leads into the great banqueting-hall of King Arthur. Beyond are the outlines of several rooms, the remains of a chapel, high battlemented walls supported by noble buttresses on the cliff side, and two per- fect doorways. Although we failed to be thrilled by "King Arthur's cups and saucers, the right royal king's bed," or even his "footsteps imprinted on the solid rock where he stepped at one stride across the chasm to Tintagel church," on the hill beyond, we were deeply impressed by the strength and dignity of what is left of this once- impregnable fortress. Even in its ruinous state it recalls the descriptions that reached the ears of Uther Pendragon when he set forth to cap- ture Dundagel and to possess himself of the fair Igernia: "A castle so munified by art and na- ture, and of so narrow an entrance over the sea and rocks by a drawbridge and chain, that three armed men could hold at bay an army on the mainland." You remember that it was only by the aid of Merlin's strategy and magic that 283 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Uther of the bloody red dragon entered the cas- tle and, disguised as Gothlois, gained admit- tance to the apartments of Igernia. From such witchcraft and treachery, bloodshed and misery, the cruel deception of the trusting Igernia and the slaying of her valiant and faithful husband, came forth that flower of knighthood, truth and courage, King Arthur. A castle, however ruinous, whose existence reaches back into the shadowy time between legend and actual history, and whose associa- tions are among the most inspiring that belong to English literature, is something to make one forget the world of to-day and dream dreams of the past. And here, seated upon a bit of grassy sward with a projecting rock to lean against, I sit and dream and write to you, while Walter and Dr. Mclvor indulge their anti- quarian tastes by examining the masonry of the outer walls of the castle. Angela and the girls, as sure-footed as the mountain goats that are the only inhabitants of the castle, climbed to the highest point, an alarmingly dizzy height! Truly, as Nordau has said, "He must have eyes that will scale Tintagel," and be sure of foot as well, I may add. They called to me from their rocky height that the view was fine and that I had better join 284 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA them. Even far below, where I sit, the pros- pect is most alluring, from Trevose Head on the south to Hartland Point on the north, which cuts off dear little Clovelly and Bideford, while still beyond in the far distance I can discern the faint cloud-like line of the Welsh coast. Quite near are Lundy Island and the Two Sisters, and far below, at the foot of a deep chasm, there is a little sheltered cove with a sandy beach where children are at play. I had written just so much of my letter when Walter and Dr. Mclvor joined me, both enthu- siastic over their explorations. The rudeness of the masonry and the use of china clay for mortar prove beyond doubt, the Doctor says, that the outer walls, bastion and gateway be- long to the period of the early Britons. Angela and the girls have come down from their eyrie, the latter quite clamorous for luncheon, which, we had been told, we should find in the little cottage where we obtained the key of the castle. Walter and I were loath to quit this charming spot for the unpromising cottage, whose refreshments we were sure would fail to refresh. But with a long after- noon before us, in which we had planned to explore the church on the cliff and to walk a mile or more along the coast to the Trebarwith 285 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON Strand, it seemed the part of wisdom to for- tify the inner man. "If we could but be sure of such 'meat and taties' as the Vicar of Morwenstow and his friend Jeune feasted upon when they came here," said Dr. Mclvor, recalling to us as we walked the visit of the two clericals to the Ship Inn near Boscastle, and the extreme reti- cence of the landlady when asked what meat she would serve her guests for their dinner. When the by no means unsavory dish was set upon the table, with not a bone to identify the joint, the good Vicar suggested that the Widow Treworgy was serving them a bit of a Bos- castle baby ; upon which the Rev. Jeune dashed into the kitchen with a fresh set of questions, to which he received the same unsatisfactory answer, 'Meat and taties.' Years after the Vicar of Morwenstow read in an ancient his- tory of Cornwall this illuminating passage: "The sillie people of Bouscastle and Boussiney do catch in the summer seas divers young soyles [seals], which, doubtful if they be fish or flesh, Conynge housewives will nevertheless roast, and do make thereof savoury meat." "Savory meat whether of Boscastle baby or young seal would be acceptable to-day," said Walter, as he sat down to our slim luncheon of 280 bread and jam and ginger ale of a sweet insipid kind peculiar to the British Isles, not at all like the spicy, pungent sort that we know in Amer- ica as the imported ale. However, with appetites sharpened by the keen bracing air of this west coast, which An- gela says is so fine because it has blown straight over from America, with no land on the way to contaminate it, we made a substantial meal. Indeed, we were so merry over it, Walter and Dr. Mclvor vying with each other in telling amusing stories of the eccentric Vicar, of which the M.D. had gathered a fresh supply during a recent visit to Morwenstow, that the land- lady's husband, a sober- visaged rustic, came to the door several times to see what the fun was about; or, as Angela suggested, to see whether some of us were not fit subjects for the county mad-house. The feast ended with toasts drunk in ginger ale, after which Ian Mclvor sang several verses of the stirring "Song of The Western Men." As the Doctor's fine baritone rang forth in the haunting refrain : "And shall Trelawney die? And shall Trelawney die? Then twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why ! " 287 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON I did not wonder that Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay had both been deceived, in believing the Vicar of Morwenstow's song to be a genuine ancient ballad. Something, perhaps the touch of pathos in Ian Mclvor's voice or my own warm sympathy with Trelawney and the other bold " conjuring bishops," brought tears to my eyes, and turning to Angela I saw something suspiciously like them in her blue eyes. What has come over our Angela, who was not wont to be moved to tears by song of man or woman? Almost before I had time to ask myself this question, she was chatting away as gayly as ever, asking me if I remembered that Trevalga was the scene of Black's "Three Feathers." A lady in the coach had pointed out to her several places described in the novel, and then with her eyes full of mischief she sang the lines that Mabyn Eosewarne was always repeating to her sister, to prove to her that her unwelcome suitor's emerald "engaged ring" was of ill omen: "Oh, green's forsaken And yellow 's forsworn, And blue's the sweetest Color that 's worn." Dr. Mclvor looked somewhat disconcerted, and I noticed, for the first time, that he had 288 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA on a bright green and particularly unbecoming necktie. Angela can be a torment, as well as a delight! We spent the afternoon in and around Tin- tagel Church, whose curious lich-gate inter- ested us even more than its unexpectedly rich interior. Rough-hewn logs, a little distance apart, are placed over the foot-path between the gate-posts, which unusual arrangement is said to prevent animals from entering the en- closure. Another surprise met us in the church- yard, where the tombstones are supported by strong buttresses of masonry, so violent are the winds on this headland. We shivered at the thought of what this hill-side must be in a winter storm, and were glad to turn our foot- steps toward a lovely cove to the south which is bounded by the shining Trebarwith sands. Here we lingered so long that the twilight had deep- ened into darkness, and the stars were shining in the blue above us, when we drove back to Boscastle. BOSCASTLE, September 8th. We decided, by the advice of some pleasant English people whom we have met here, to devote this beautiful Sunday to two interest- ing old churches near Boscastle, the Minster Church and St. Simforium at Forrabury. Our 19 289 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON way to the Minster Church, this morning, was up a steep little street, almost as precipitous as the high street of Clovelly a charming little village street with picturesque cottages hanging on the sides of the hill, set about with gardens and orchards. A part of the walk was by bab- bling streamlets and through wood paths as lovely as those by which Lancelot and Guinevere rode "through the coverts of the deer," in that far-off time which seems strangely near us to-day in this, the home of the Arthurian story. Although this is not "the boyhood of the year," the verdure of these well- watered forests and meadows is as rich as when, with tears and smiles: " Spring upon the plain Came in a sunlit fall of rain. And far, in the forest deeps unseen, The topmost elm-tree gather'd green From draughts of balmy air." The Minster Church dedicated to St. Metherian, a quite unknown quantity to us, is situated in a deep, well-wooded valley and is quaint and interesting with its carved oak arches, and tablets of greater or less antiquity. In the south aisle we found a monument bear- ing this curious inscription : 290 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA " Forty-nine years they lived man and wife, And what 's more rare, thus many without strife ; She first departing, he a few weeks tried To live without her, could not, and so died." The name of this town, Boscastle, is we find the result of the shortening of names in which the English delight, being originally the site of the Castle of Bottreaux, the estate of a Norman family who settled here in the reign of Henry II. Nothing is left of the castle but a green mound. Forrabury Church, although ancient, is still a quite substantial building. As the afternoon service was later than we had thought, we climbed up the steep hill upon which the Willa Park signal-house stands and looks down upon the little church below. Stand- ing out boldly upon a stretch of tableland, girt about by fields of yellowing grain, and flanked by the small gray villages of Trevalga and Bos- castle, the church and its surroundings seemed to us typically English and peaceful enough to have inspired a pastoral of Cowper or Words- worth. And yet, framing in this quiet picture, is a rugged and dangerous coast-line. The very name of the church speaks of the uncertainty of life upon these wild shores, as Forrabury means "a far off or fair burying-place," and 291 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON its silent tower is associated with a sorrowful tale of shipwreck. This story, one of our Eng- lish acquaintances related to us, with that pleasant readiness to contribute his share to the general entertainment which we are coming to look upon as an English trait. "After the building of the little church the Lord of Bottreaux sent a peal of bells, cast in London, to Forrabury by sea. When the vessel was still off Willa Park Point the pilot, a sailor from Trevenna, heard the sound of his own church-bells and gave thanks to God, upon which the captain, less devout than his pilot, said that they had only their stout ship to thank. The pilot remonstrated, the captain broke out in a volley of oaths, whereupon in the words of the Vicar of Morwenstow: 'Up rose that sea, as if it heard The mighty Master's signal word.' The gale increased and hard upon the perilous rocks the ill-fated ship was soon hurled, a total wreck." "And the good pilot?" asked Lisa, who is my own child in her eagerness for a proper and satisfactory ending of a story. "He clung to a plank," said Mr. Andrews, "and was washed ashore by a friendly wave." 292 DUNDAGEL BY THE SEA "I 'm so glad! And the wicked captain, was he drowned?" asked Lisa, with the entire resig- nation with which children always regard the destruction of the wicked. "Yes," continued Mr. Andrews, "the captain was drowned, and to this day it is said Still when the storm of Bottreaux's waves Is wakening in its weedy caves, Those bells that sullen surges hide, Peal their deep notes beneath the tide. ' Come to thy God in time ! ' Thus saith the ocean chime; 1 Storm, billow, whirlwind past, Come to thy God at last.' " The tower of the Forrabury Church, which is of three stages and finished with battlements, like so many of these ancient West of England churches, now contains but one bell, instead of the chime of bells that was intended for it. In the interior are several monuments to the Bot- treaux family and some good carvings. Although the shores of Cornwall are less rich and fertile than the Devonshire land, these bare, bald hills and treeless downs make their own appeal to us, which Dr. Mclvor says is somewhat like the appeal of his dear Scottish hills. These Cornish folk, like the Scotch, are imaginative, poetic and superstitious. One can 293 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON readily understand this being the home of the Arthurian story, with which the traditions of St. Joseph and his fellow pilgrims are so strangely interwoven. We are regretting now that we have not given ourselves time to go down to Penzance, and St. Michael's Mound, which has also its associations with Joseph of Arimathea. Is not travel just a bit like life? we are always learning, often when it is too late, what to do and what to leave undone, and hoping to pass by this way again and pick up the threads. Is that too serious an ending to my letter? "Well, then, here is a bit of gossip. Angela has been so disagreeable to Dr. Mclvor that I wonder that he speaks to her at all. He is sensitive and shows that he feels her rebuffs by being formal and studiously polite. I feel sorry for him, mais que faire? XIII A HIGHWAY OF KINGS EXETER, September 9th. WE left Boscastle this morning, driving to Camelford and there taking a train to Oke- hampton. That old town, lying under the shadow of Yes Tor, may have many charms, and there is said to be a ruined castle nearly hidden away in a great park; but for us all of its attractions were obscured by a blinding fall of rain. We drove to the White Hart, bag and baggage, which fortunately was only hand lug- gage, as we had our trunks sent on from Bide- f ord by ' ' advance luggage, ' ' and let me tell you, just here, for your comfort when you travel in England again, that we found this arrange- ment most satisfactory and reasonable. And what a comfort it is to be rid of the care of trunks, which we have had to follow about like detectives, at every change of cars! As the rain persisted, and there was no chance of see- ing the park, or the ghostly Lady Howard, who only plucks her historic blade of grass in the 295 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON dead of the night, we held a serious consulta- tion as to whether we should drive on to Chag- ford, as we had planned, or take the next train to Exeter. I say a serious consultation quite advisedly, for anything more dejected than Dr. Mclvor and Angela this morning I have seldom seen. One cannot wonder much at the Doctor's depression, as he leaves us at Exeter or South- ampton; but Angela is quite as dull! "Walter says that he is tired of seeing him look like a tombstone, and wishes he would settle the mat- ter with Angela and go back to his ' ' Grampian Hills," and feed his father's flocks for him. When I remark that the settling of the matter may make Ian Mclvor a sadder and a wiser man, he shakes his head and says, "It would be impossible for him to be sadder why he even doesn't care to fish, and lost a fine perch that was on his line the other day just from pure heedlessness;" and as for Angela, he says, with a shake of his wise head that "the ways of women are past finding out, but " What that fateful "but " was meant to convey I was not destined to learn, as the Doctor and Angela, who had been inquiring as to routes and trains, appeared at this moment. This is a digression, but I am sure you are quite sufficiently interested to pardon it, and 296 A HIGHWAY OF KINGS will be pleased to know that Dr. Mclvor, what- ever the state of his heart may be, still retains a reasonable share of common sense. This he showed by agreeing with me. Could there be a better proof of it! The particular point upon which the Doctor and I agreed was that it would be foolish to drive eleven miles to Chagford in a closed carriage, an open one being out of the question in this pour, simply to spend a night there, as we had to be here by the tenth in order to catch our boat at Southampton on Wednesday. So we turned our backs on the storied charms of Chagford, hoping to return sometime when we have an entire week to stop at "The Three Crowns," and to follow the delusive Yes Tor, as did Josephine Tozier's party, who found the old town so enchanting. Before we reached Exeter the sun was shin- ing with tantalizing brilliancy, but we need have no regrets, for by losing the drive to Chagford we have gained more time in this ancient city, which has so much to offer us in its beautiful Cathedral, its noble ruins, and above all in its historic associations. Exeter, once the capital of the west, is, as Professor Freeman tells us, "the only English City that can boast of an un- broken existence for eighteen hundred years, the one City in which we can feel sure that 297 human habitation and civic life have never ceased from the days of the early Caesars to our own. * * * * The City alike of Briton, Ro- man, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the City where Jupiter' gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Woden. British Caerwisc, Roman Isca, West Saxon Exeter, may well stand first on our roll-call of English Cities. Others can boast of a fuller share of modern greatness; none other can trace a life so unbroken to so remote a past." As we walked along High Street, past the handsome old Guildhall, and near the ruins of Rougemont Castle, Dr. Mclvor explained to us that this street follows the old Roman road, and that the great mound on which the ruins of the castle stand was once a British strong- hold. A highway of kings was this street, that is now so full of shops and trams, for we may believe that by this way passed Caesar and his legions, King Arthur and his knights, Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Edward the Black Prince, the Edwards who came before and after him, and Charles I and his Queen, whose daughter, Henrietta, was born in Bed- ford House near by. The Princess Katharine of Aragon also 298 A HIGHWAY OF KINGS stopped two nights at the deanery in Exeter on her ill-starred journey from Plymouth to London, to marry Prince Arthur, and was, according to the old story, so annoyed by the noise of the weathercock on the quaint church of St. Mary Michel that it was taken down. And Walter reminds us that Richard III must have been here, as Shakespeare makes him say : "Richmond! When last I was in Exeter, The mayor in courtesy show'd me the castle And called it Rouge-rnont ; at which name I started, Because a bard of Ireland told me once I should not live long after I saw Richmond." Surely Exeter should have its pageants, for no English city, except London, can boast a history so varied and interesting. In addition to all the kings and princes who passed this way, there also journeyed along this old street the great sea captains, Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson, and here came conquering Fair- fax, Monmouth going to his death and William of Orange to his throne. Is n't it all quite thrill- ing, something that one would not miss for gold or gain? Walter found a book of Professor Freeman's about Exeter, in one of the shops, which we are reading to-night with great in- terest. I mean that Walter and I are reading it, as Angela and the Doctor have gone out to 299 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON see Bougemont Castle by the light of the moon. I am beginning to feel as Walter does upon that subject from several little things that have happened to-day and then a little French coup- let about L' Amour has been running through my mind most persistently all day : " Qui que tu sois voiei ton maitre, II est, il f ut ou il doit etre." Has Angela really yielded to the spells of the little blind god? "Qui 'en sabe?" Walter asks, by way of in- troducing another language into the discussion, and then he very gracefully reminds me that Angela is not the only woman of his acquaint- ance "who was a long time making up her mind." "Which way her happiness lay," I said, finishing out his sentence so entirely to his satisfaction that we stopped talking about Angela and fell to pleasant castle-building, while Walter smoked his cigar and I waited for the return of the wanderers. The night was too glorious to spend in doors, and we finally started to see Eougemont Castle by the light of the moon. On our way there we passed Angela and Dr. Mclvor, on the other side of High Street, but they were talking so earnestly that they never saw us. 300 A HIGHWAY OF KINGS September 10th. We have changed all of our plans, Mar- garet dear, and are going to London to-night instead of to Southampton. Why, I will tell you, but, as Angela always says, I must begin at the beginning of the story. As we had only walked around and about the Cathedral yesterday to enjoy its beautiful architecture, Walter and the girls and I went there this morning immediately after breakfast. At the last moment Angela concluded to go with Dr. Mclvor to see St. Mary Arches, which he thinks much more interesting than the Cathedral. The minstrel gallery on the north wall of Exeter Cathedral is said to be the finest in England. It is much more beautiful than the gallery at Wells, and is so rich in its carving and decoration that it is impossible for me to conceive of anything of its kind more lovely. The twelve angels in the niches, bearing differ- ent musical instruments, are exquisitely carved, and the corbelled heads beneath are those of Edward III and his queen, Philippa. I am send- ing you a photograph of this gallery, which you will love, as I do. Christine was perfectly delighted to find a 301 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON window, near the west entrance, in memory of Bichard Doddridge Blackmore, the author of her favorite Lorna Doone. Under the window is a white marble tablet which bears, with titles and dates, the following inscription: " Insight and humor, and the rythmic roll Of antique lore, his fertile fancies sway'd, And with their various eloquence array'd His sterling English, pure and clear and whole." A. J. M. "He added Christian courtesy and the humility of all thoughtful minds to a certain grand and glorious gift of radiating humanity." CRADDOCK NOWELL. Is it not a most lovely inscription and one well worthy of a man who has given so much pure and healthful pleasure to the world? We had just turned from the Blackmore tablet and were walking toward the choir when we saw Angela and Dr. Mclvor enter by the south door. They paused a moment on the threshold, where the sun shone upon Angela's blonde head, lighting up every thread to purest gold. As she came forward it seemed as if she brought sunshine with her into the darkness of the Cathedral, which is, I hope, a happy omen that joy and peace may come to her in large measure, for of course we knew, at once, that something had happened. 302 A HIGHWAY OF KINGS Walter did the right thing, the one thing that men always do on such occasions, which was to shake the Doctor's hand vigorously. I really don't know what I said to Angela, for I sud- denly felt strangely guilty and ashamed of what I had thought of Dr. Mclvor's not being good enough or handsome enough for her. In a moment all my small and petty objections seemed to fall away, and looking into his frank, manly face I felt sure that Angela had chosen wisely. As we walked home I said something to Angela about her seriousness of late, and of my not having spoken of it, because I thought that she was feeling sorry for Dr. Mclvor, who was to leave us so soon ; upon which she turned her radiant face to me and said, with her own charming frankness, "Why Z., dear, how could you think that? I was sorry for myself, be- cause I thought that Dr. Mclvor didn't care for me." Was not that just like Angela's unexpected- ness? "And as you thought that he did not care for you, and as he was quite sure that you did not care for him, how in the world did you ever come to an understanding?" I asked. "I think," said Angela, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, "that it was through the 303 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON intervention of Christine's pony. I admired it so much that Dr. Mclvor offered to go the next day and catch one for me. I said that I wouldn't accept a pony from him if he caught a dozen. This seemed to hurt his feelings, which was perfectly absurd, as he couldn't ex- pect me to accept ponies and things from him, not being a child like Christine; and then he was very high and mighty, and I undertook to bring him down a peg or two." "And you succeeded, between you, in being very miserable." "Yes, and last night, when he began talking about going back to York, and the many miles that would separate us, when I am in my own home, I began to think that he cared a little, and so we made up our quarrel by the light of the moon." The dear little pony, troublesome as it may be to get him home, had his hour of usefulness. I fancy, although Angela did not say so, that she was angry because Dr. Mclvor did not offer her the pony, at first, and then being provoked at herself for caring at all, she gave him the benefit of her ill humors. It all seems very silly and childish; but lovers can make a quarrel over anything, no matter how trifling. Every- thing is settled now, and they are as happy as 304 A HIGHWAY OF KINGS two birds on a bough, but I am thinking of the time of reckoning with the parents. Angela has been planning to meet her father and mother in Paris, but as they are now due in London we have decided to go there this afternoon. I must really give an account of my stewardship, our stewardship, I should say, for although Walter calls me a match- maker, I tell him that he has had more to do with this particular match than I have, as he and Dr. Mclvor have been fast friends from the first and it was he who encouraged the Doctor to join us. I am finishing my letter hurriedly, as I wish you to have the news as speedily as possible. Angela sends her love and says she will write to you soon, and that of all things she wishes you and Allan to know her Ian Mclvor. How much prettier Ian is than plain John! The common tie of Scotch blood should make Allan and the Doctor good friends. You will doubt- less have an opportunity to meet him soon, as Walter has invited him to spend Christmas with us at The Gables. May we not count upon you and Allan to join us and complete the party? I have just had a letter from Miss Cassandra, telling me that she and Lydia will sail with us from Cherbourg on the twenty-fifth. As Archie 20 305 AN ENGLISH HONEYMOON will probably be one of our party, Walter al- ready predicts another engagement, and in view of my "match-making proclivities,'-' as he is pleased to call my acceptance of this match of his making, he says that he shall have to guard Christine and Lisa against my wiles. And now adieu, as we shall soon be on our way to London. Some of these days we shall be coming over to Scotland to visit Angela in her Highland castle. Dr. Mclvor is a laird in his own country, and has quite a long string of titles. Isn't it odd that this ancient highway of kings should have become for us a byway of lovers ! "and of Honeymooners as well," adds Angela, to whom I have just read this last par- agraph; Honeymooners being her latest name for Walter and me. She insists that she and Dr. Mclvor saw us last night when we were on our way to Rougemont Castle, but says that we were too deep in conversation to notice them. From which you see that she has recovered her spirits and is once more our teasing, charm- ing Angela. And how she puzzles, fascinates and bewilders her M.D. ! Again, au revoir, until we meet in the land of the Stars and Stripes. Your always devoted, ZELPHINE. A 000129012 1