e is just a dear old Father." Anything
about our Lord engrossed her imagination; and it was a frequent wish of
hers that He would come again. "Then,"--poor perplexed little mortal!
whose difficulties one could not even guess at--"we should be quite
sure of things. Miss Catherine tells us from books: He would tell us
from His memory. People would not be so cruel to Him now. Queen
Victoria would not allow any one to crucify Him."

I don't think that W. V., in spite of her confidence in my good faith,
was quite convinced of the existence of those old forests of which I
had told her, until I explained that they were forests of stone, which,
if men did not mar them, would blossom for centuries unchanged, though
the hands that planted them had long been blown in dust about the
world. She understood all that I meant when we visited York and
Westminster, and walked through the long avenues of stone palms and
pines, with their overarching boughs, and gazed at the marvellous
rose-windows in which all the jewels of the world seemed to have been
set, and saw the colours streaming through the gorgeous lancets and
high many-lighted casements. After that it was delightful to turn over
engravings and photographs of ruined abbeys and famous old churches at
home and abroad, and to anticipate the good time when we should visit
them together, and perhaps not only descend into the crypts but go
through the curious galleries which extend over the pillars of the
nave, and even climb up to the leaded roof of the tower, or dare the
long windy staircases and ladders which mount into the spire, and so
look down on the quaint map of streets, and houses, and gardens, and
squares, hundreds of feet below.

She liked to hear how some of those miracles of stone had been
fashioned and completed--how monks in the days of old had travelled
over the land with the relics of saints, collecting treasure of all
sorts for the expense of the work; how sometimes the people came in
hundreds dragging great oaks and loads of quarried stone, and bringing
fat hogs, beans, corn, and beer for the builders and their workmen; how
even queens carried block or beam to the masons, so that with their own
hands they might help in the glorious labour; and poor old women gave
assistance by cooking food and washing and spinning and weaving and
making and mending; how when the foundations were blessed kings and
princes and powerful barons laid each a stone, and when the ch