path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral,
turn to the left under a stone doorway--then I am on the other side of
the building--which, leaving behind me, I pass on through two college-
like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of dean and
prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass
through one of the old city gates and then you are in College Street,
through which I pass, and at the end thereof, crossing some meadows,
and at last a country of alley gardens I arrive, that is my worship
arrives, at the foundation of St Cross, which is a very interesting old
place.... Then I pass across St Cross meadows till I come to the most
beautiful clear river."

That walk, or rather that over the meads to St Cross, is for every
lover of Winchester that which he takes most often I think, that which
comes to him first in every memory of the city. Its beauty makes it
sacred and its reward is an hour or more in what, when all is said, is
one of the loveliest relics of the Middle Age anywhere left to us in
England, I mean the hospital and church of St Cross in the meads of the
Itchen.

Doubtless we are the heirs of the Ages, into our hearts and minds the
Empire, the Middle Age and the Renaissance have poured their riches.
Doubtless we are the flower of Time and our Age, the rose of all the
Ages. That is why, in our wisdom, we have superseded such places as St
Cross by our modern workhouses.

St Cross was founded by the great Henry of Blois in 1133 for the
reception, the clothing and the entertainment of thirteen poor men,
decayed or past their strength, and the relief of an hundred others; it
was a mediaeval workhouse, called a hospital in those days, and in its
beauty and its humanity and its success it cannot, of course, compare
with the institutions which, since we have not been able to abolish
poverty altogether, we have everywhere established for the reception of
our unfortunate brethren. It would be odd indeed if eight hundred
years of Christian government, four hundred of them enjoying the
infinite blessings bestowed by the Reformation and the Protestant
religion, had not vastly improved these institutions for the reception
of the very poor. It is, in fact, in such establishments as our
workhouses that our "progress" is to be seen most clearly.

[Illustration: ST CROSS, WINCHESTER]

Well, it is something to be assured of that; and yet, let me confess
it, St Cross has a curious fascin