e in which to walk and
summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or
seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the
rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps
eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those
magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely
way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and
bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out of doors.
Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and
behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and
mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around, that it will assume a
rarer and finer tincture, even more grateful to the understanding, if not
to the senses, than that form of the emotion which arises from such
companionship in spots where all is life, and growth, and fecundity.

It was in this solemn place, whither they had withdrawn from the sight of
relatives on one cold day in March, that Sir Ashley Mottisfont asked in
marriage, as his second wife, Philippa, the gentle daughter of plain
Squire Okehall. Her life had been an obscure one thus far; while Sir
Ashley, though not a rich man, had a certain distinction about him; so
that everybody thought what a convenient, elevating, and, in a word,
blessed match it would be for such a supernumerary as she. Nobody
thought so more than the amiable girl herself. She had been smitten with
such affection for him that, when she walked the cathedral aisles at his
side on the before-mentioned day, she did not know that her feet touched
hard pavement; it seemed to her rather that she was floating in space.
Philippa was an ecstatic, heart-thumping maiden, and could not understand
how she had deserved to have sent to her such an illustrious lover, such
a travelled personage, such a handsome man.

When he put the question, it was in no clumsy language, such as the
ordinary bucolic county landlords were wont to use on like quivering
occasions, but as elegantly as if he had been taught it in Enfield's
_Speaker_. Yet he hesitated a little--for he had something to add.

'My pretty Philippa,' he said (she was not very pretty by the way), 'I
have, you must know, a little girl dependent upon me: a little waif I
found one day in a patch of wild oats [such was this worthy barone