umpery German thing so-called--but the real Spanish
guitar.

CHAPTER II

The Starting--Peterborough Cathedral--Anglo-Saxon Names--Kaempe
Viser--Steam--Norman Barons--Chester Ale--Sion Tudor--Pretty Welsh
Tongue.

So our little family, consisting of myself, my wife Mary, and my daughter
Henrietta, for daughter I shall persist in calling her, started for Wales
in the afternoon of the 27th July, 1854. We flew through part of Norfolk
and Cambridgeshire in a train which we left at Ely, and getting into
another, which did not fly quite so fast as the one we had quieted,
reached the Peterborough station at about six o'clock of a delightful
evening. We proceeded no farther on our journey that day, in order that
we might have an opportunity of seeing the cathedral.

Sallying arm in arm from the Station Hotel, where we had determined to
take up our quarters for the night, we crossed a bridge over the deep
quiet Nen, on the southern bank of which stands the station, and soon
arrived at the cathedral--unfortunately we were too late to procure
admission into the interior, and had to content ourselves with walking
round it and surveying its outside.

It is named after, and occupies the site, or part of the site of an
immense monastery, founded by the Mercian King Peda, in the year 665, and
destroyed by fire in the year 1116, which monastery, though originally
termed Medeshamsted, or the homestead on the meads, was subsequently
termed Peterborough, from the circumstance of its having been reared by
the old Saxon monarch for the love of God and the honour of Saint Peter,
as the Saxon Chronicle says, a book which I went through carefully in my
younger days, when I studied Saxon, for, as I have already told the
reader, I was in those days a bit of a philologist. Like the first, the
second edifice was originally a monastery, and continued so till the time
of the Reformation; both were abodes of learning; for if the Saxon
Chronicle was commenced in the monkish cells of the first, it was
completed in those of the second. What is at present called Peterborough
Cathedral is a noble venerable pile, equal upon the whole in external
appearance to the cathedrals of Toledo, Burgos and Leon, all of which I
have seen. Nothing in architecture can be conceived more beautiful than
the principal entrance, which fronts the west, and which, at the time we
saw it, was gilded with the rays of the setting sun.

After having strolled about