at my sensitive companion gave way to the force of it.

"You must bury me here, you know"--he caught at my arm. "It's the first
place of worship I've seen in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it
stands!"

It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the sense
the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over some seven
miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of that lesson; and
all through such a mist of local colour that we felt ourselves a pair
of Smollett's pedestrian heroes faring tavernward for a night of
adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of
the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and
as we got closer stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of
the solid minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered
the russet town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots
and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and gazed
insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning wasting
afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices of the chimes
cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the cathedral-tower; saw it linger
and nestle and abide, as it loves to do on all perpendicular spaces,
converting them irresistibly into registers and dials; tasted too, as
deeply, of the peculiar stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy
English lad come forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school
that dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
together on the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood gone and
come through cathedral-shades as a King's scholar, and yet kept ruddy
with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the third morning we betook
ourselves to Lackley, having learned that parts of the "grounds" were
open to visitors, and that indeed on application the house was sometimes
shown.

Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of the
hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound and circled
from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and untended
as I had found a few of the large loose villas of old Italy, and I was
still ne