a taste for
ritual and bring me into the true fold. I have been hearing dear old Dr.
Kyle a great deal lately, and aunt Celia says that he is the most
dangerous Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards
Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, she was engaged to a young architect. He, with
his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an imaginary
scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest, an unmapped
territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal there, on
which he has remained ever since. He has been only a memory for many
years, to be sure, for he died at the age of twenty-six, before he had
had time to build anything but a livery stable and a country hotel. This
is fortunate, on the whole, because aunt Celia thinks he was destined to
establish American architecture on a higher plane,--rid it of its base,
time-serving, imitative instincts, and waft it to a height where, in the
course of centuries, we should have been revered and followed by all the
nations of the earth. I went to see the livery stable, after one of
these Miriam-like flights of prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn't
fair to judge a man's promise by one performance, and that one a livery
stable, so I shall say nothing.

This sentiment about architecture and this fondness for the very
toppingest High Church ritual cause aunt Celia to look on the English
cathedrals with solemnity and reverential awe. She has given me a fat
notebook, with "Katharine Schuyler" stamped in gold letters on the Russia
leather cover, and a lock and key to protect its feminine confidences. I
am not at all the sort of girl who makes notes, and I have told her so;
but she says that I must at least record my passing impressions, if they
are ever so trivial and commonplace.

I wanted to go directly from Southampton to London with the Abbotts, our
ship friends, who left us yesterday. Roderick Abbott and I had had a
charming time on board ship (more charming than aunt Celia knows, because
she was very ill, and her natural powers of chaperoning were severely
impaired), and the prospect of seeing London sights together was not
unpleasing; but Roderick Abbott is not in aunt Celia's itinerary, which
reads: "Winchester, Salisbury, Wells, Bath, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford,
London, Ely, Lincoln, York, Durham."

Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and when they
are thrown in contact with those wh