sails went round and round in the free East Anglian winds. Close by,
the gabled houses leaned out over the streets, planted fair upon
sturdy timbers that grew in the olden time, all glorying among
themselves upon their beauty. And out of them, buttress by buttress,
growing and going upwards, aspiring tower by tower, rose the
cathedral.

And she saw the people moving in the streets all
leisurely and slow, and unseen among them, whispering to each other,
unheard by living men and concerned only with bygone things, drifted
the ghosts of very long ago. And wherever the streets ran eastwards,
wherever were gaps in the houses, always there broke into view the
sight of the great marshes, like to some bar of music weird and
strange that haunts a melody, arising again and again, played on the
violin by one musician only, who plays no other bar, and he is swart
and lank about the hair and bearded about the lips, and his
moustache droops long and low, and no one knows the land from which
he comes.

All these were good things for a new soul to see.

Then the sun set over green fields and ploughland and the night came
up. One by one the merry lights of cheery lamp-lit windows took
their stations in the solemn night.

Then the bells rang, far up in a cathedral tower,
and their melody fell on the roofs of the old houses and poured over
their eaves until the streets were full, and then flooded away over
green fields and plough, till it came to the sturdy mill and brought
the miller trudging to evensong, and far away eastwards and seawards
the sound rang out over the remoter marshes. And it was all as
yesterday to the old ghosts in the streets.

Then the Dean's wife took Mary Jane to evening service, and she saw
three hundred candles filling all the aisle with light. But sturdy
pillars stood there in unlit vastnesses; great colonnades going away
into the gloom, where evening and morning, year in year out, they
did their work in the dark, holding the cathedral roof aloft. And it
was stiller than the marshes are still when the ice has come and the
wind that brought it has fallen.

Suddenly into this stillness rushed the sound of the organ, roaring,
and presently the people prayed and sang.

No longer could Mary Jane
see their prayers ascending like thin gold chains, for that was but
an elfin fancy, but she imagined clear in her new soul the seraphs
passing in the ways of Paradise, and the angels changing guard to
watch