a sort of rich dull
yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly
appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church--the
side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of;
the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown
archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing
something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow
intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a
King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and
picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept
up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very
picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome,
and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones,
themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister
opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none
the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful
wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and
impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or
supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but
it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and
as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps,
runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the
faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble
ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea."
From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger
to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with
tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if
it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height
which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering
down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of
course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place
is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down
at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit
of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late
in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a
service in the choir, but it w