at way. We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again, with
intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we receive the
"nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is all the brighter for
coming intermittently. In a large prospect we are not conscious of
this limitation because of the wideness of the field and the number and
variety of objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series of
pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most beautiful object
in nature or art does but diminish the pleasure. Practically it ceases
to be beautiful and only recovers the first effect after we have given
the mind an interval of rest.

Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I began to pay
attention to the movements of a man who was manifestly there with the
same object as myself--to look at the cathedral. I had seen him there
for quite half an hour, and now began to be amused at the emphatic
manner in which he displayed his interest in the building. He walked
up and down the entire length and would then back away a distance of
a hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then slowly
approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when quite near the
wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed aloft, the back of his
head almost resting on his back between his shoulders. His hat somehow
kept on his head, but his attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs
who, to give an idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object,
say that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off. The Americans,
when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different expression; they said
that to look up at so tall a thing caused the tobacco juice to run down
your throat.

His appearance when I approached him interested me too. His skin was
the color of old brown leather and he had a big arched nose, clear light
blue very shrewd eyes, and a big fringe or hedge of ragged white beard
under his chin; and he was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown
tweeds, evidently home-made. When I spoke to him, saying something about
the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch. It was, he
said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen and he had never seen
anything made by man to equal it in beauty. He had come, he told me,
straight from his home and birthplace, a small village in the north of
Scotla