!" said she, and
blushed. I wish I could make myself believe her jealous. You would
probably encourage me to think it!

Wordsworth loved the pleasant region of the Quantock hills, you know,
and wrote some charming poems while he and Coleridge lived at Nether
Stowey and Alforden; but just to see, in passing, Nether Stowey looks
unattractive; and as for Bridgewater, not much farther on (where a red
road has turned pink, then pale, then white with chalk), it is as
commercial to look at as it is historical to read of. When a boy, in
bloodthirsty moods, I used to pore over that history; read how Judge
Jeffreys lodged at Bridgewater during the Bloody Assizes (the house is
gone now, washed away like an old blood stain); how the moor between
Weston and Bridgewater (in these days lined with motors) was lined with
Feversham's gibbets after Sedgemoor. Doesn't Macaulay refer to that as
"the last fight deserving the name of battle, fought on English soil"?
Then there was the story of "Swayne's Jumps," which one connected with
Bridgewater. He made his famous escape in Toxley Wood, close by, and to
this day the place is marked with three stones. That sort of thing
rushes you back in a minute over long distances in time, doesn't it?--as
motors rush you forward in a minute over long distances of space.

So to Glastonbury, by way of Poland Hill, looking down over the
Sedgemoor plain, Chedzoy Church, on whose southern buttress the battle
axes were sharpened, and Weston Zoyland, with its Dutch-sounding name,
and Dutch-looking dykes.

I never saw Glastonbury until now, and I'm not sure that, having seen
it, I shan't be obliged to hook it on top of Winchester, on my bump of
reverence. Not that one can compare its ruined grandeur with
well-preserved Winchester, the comparison lies in the oldness and the
early beginnings of religion. I believe Glastonbury is the one religious
institution in which Briton, Saxon, and Norman all share and share
alike; so the place seems to bind our race to a race supplanted. St.
Dunstan is the "great man" of the place, because he it was who restored
the monastery after Danish wars; but he is a modern celebrity beside
Joseph of Arimathea, the founder, who came with eleven companions to
bring the Holy Word to Britain. It was the Archangel Gabriel who bade
him found a church in honour of the Virgin; and it was a real
inspiration of the archangel's; for what one can see of the chapel of
St. Joseph is absolutely pe