times mayor of the said town." He and his wife Joan have their
monuments in the church, and upon his tomb is inscribed the list of his
ships. He entered holy orders in his declining years, and founded a
college at Westbury, whither he retired. It has for many years been the
custom for the mayor and corporation of Bristol to attend this church on
Whitsunday in state, when the pavement is strewn with rushes and the
building decorated with flowers. In the western entrance is suspended a
bone of a large whale, which, according to tradition, is the rib of the
dun cow that anciently supplied Bristol with her milk. Sebastian Cabot,
in all probability, presented the city with this bone after his
discovery of Newfoundland. The chief popular interest in St. Mary
Redcliffe, however, is its connection with Thomas Chatterton, born in a
neighboring street in 1752, the son of a humble schoolmaster, who
ultimately went up to London to write for the booksellers, and there
committed suicide at the early age of seventeen. A monument to this
precocious genius, who claimed to have recovered ancient manuscripts
from the church-archives, stands in the churchyard. Bristol is full of
old and quaint churches and narrow yet picturesque streets, with lofty
gabled timber-houses.

[Illustration: CLIFTON SUSPENSION-BRIDGE, BRISTOL.]

The great gorge of the Avon, five hundred feet deep, is, however, its
most attractive possession. The suspension-bridge, erected by the
munificence of a citizen, spans this gorge at the height of two hundred
and eighty-seven feet, and cost nearly $500,000. It is twelve hundred
and twenty feet long, and has a single span of seven hundred and three
feet crossing the ravine between St. Vincent's Rocks and the Leigh
Woods. Alongside this gorge rises Brandon Hill, which Queen Elizabeth
sold to two citizens of Bristol, who in turn sold it to the city, with a
proviso that the corporation should there "admit the drying of clothes
by the townswomen, as had been accustomed;" and to this day its western
slope is still used as a clothes-drying ground. From this the tradition
arose--which, however, Bristol denounces as a libel--"that the queen
gave the use of this hill to poor freemen's daughters as a dowry,
because she took compassion on the many plain faces which she saw in one
of her visits." Some hot springs issue out of St. Vincent's Rocks, and
these give Clifton fame as a watering-place. A fine pump-house has been
built there,