XIISHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD

THE PRIORY CHURCH—NORTH VIEW

In the very earliest times Malvern seems to have been a British stronghold against the Romans, and perhaps, again, the Saxons; but otherwise its peaceful history is resumed in that of its beautiful Priory church, an edifice which is fabled to have begun its religious life as a Druid temple. On one of the three Beacons, as the chief of the Malvern Hills are called, after the three counties of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford in which they rise,

“Twelve fair counties saw the blaze”

which signaled the approach of the Spanish Armada. But the local history is not of that dense succession of events, against whose serried points the visitor so often dashes himself in vain elsewhere in England. He can let his fancy roam up and down the vague past, with nothing, except the possible surrender of Caractacus to the Romans, very definitely important to hinder it, from the dawn of time to the year 1842, when the Priessnitz system of water-cure chose Malvern the capital of English hydropathy. The Wells of Malvern had always been famous for their healing properties, and now modern faith added itself to ancient superstition, and from the centre of belief thus established, a hydropathic religion spread throughout England. Its monuments still confront one everywhere in the minor hotels or major boarding-houses which briefly call themselves Hydros, but probably do not attempt working the old miracles. There is still a commodious shrine for the performance of these in the heart of Malvern; but the place was plainly no longer the Mecca of the pilgrims of thirty or fifty years ago. The air of its hills indeed invites the ailing, who so abound in England, but the waters have found the level which even medicinalwaters seek, and flow away in the obscurity attending the decline of so many once thronged and honored Spas.

I do not know that I particularly like ruinous ruins, but a decay that is still in tolerable repair is greatly to my mind. The better the repair, the greater my pleasure in it, and when we were once posited in our lodgings, I began to take comfort in the perfect neatness, the unfailing taste, the pious care with which the spirit of that dead Malvern guarded its sepulchre. There was all the apparatus of a social gayety beneficial to invalids, but not, so far as I could note, an invalid to profit by it, if it had been running. In a certain public garden, indeed, in the centre of the town, there was a sound of revelry emitted by a hidden band, in the afternoon and evening, but I had never the heart to penetrate its secret; within, the garden might not have looked so gay as it sounded. There were excellent large and little shops, including a book and periodical store, where you could get almost anything you wanted, or did not want, at watering-place prices. There was an Assembly building, always locked fast, and a very good public library where I resorted for books of reference, and for a word of intellectual converse with the kind assistant librarian who formed my social circle in Malvern. From somewhere in the dim valley at night there came bursts of fragmentary minstrelsy, which we were told by the maid was the professional rejoicing of Pierrots, a gleeful tribe summer England has borrowed from the French tradition almost as lavishly as the crude creations of our own burnt-cork opera. Wherever you go, among her thronged and thronging watering-places, these strongly contrasted figures meet and cheer you; even in Malvern there were strains of rag-time, mingling with the music of the Pierrots, which gave assurance of these duskier presences somewhere in the dark.

One afternoon we went to a politer entertainment in a lower room of the Assembly building, given by a company which had so vividly plastered the dead walls (if this is specific) of Malvern with the announcements of their coming, that we hastened to be among the earliest at the box-office lest we should not get seats. To make sure of seeing and hearing we took two-shilling seats, which were at the front, and it was well we did so, for before the curtain rose, a multitude of fourteen people thronged to the one-shilling benches behind us. This number I knew from deliberate count, for the curtain, as if in a sad prescience of adversity, was long in rising. I do not think that company of artists would have been very cheerful under the best conditions; as it was they afforded us the very sorrowfulest amusement I have ever enjoyed. In that pathetic retrospect it seems to me that one man and woman of them sang at different times comic duets with tears in their voices. There were also from time to time joyless glees, and there was an interlude of dancing, so very, very blameless that it was all but actively virtuous in its modesty. A sense of something perpetually provincial, something irretrievably amateurish in the performers, penetrated the American spectators; and it is from a heart still full of pity that I recall how plain they were, poor girls, how floor-walkerish they were, poor fellows. They were as one family in their mutual disability and forbearance; if perhaps they each knew how badly the others were doing, they did nothing to show it; and in their joint weakness they were unable to spare us a single act of their programme. I have seldom left a hall of mirth in so haggard a frame, but perhaps if I had been moreinured to Malvern I could have borne my pleasure better.

If this was not, strictly speaking, a concert, that was certainly a concert which I attended one evening at a Baptist chapel, where a company of Welsh miners sang like a company of Welsh angels. I was in hopes they would have sung in Welsh, which, as is well known, was the language of Paradise, but they sang in English as good as English ever can be in comparison; and instead of Bardic measures, it was all terribly classic, or when not classic, religious. As I say, though, the voices were divine, and I asked myself if such heavenly sounds could issue, at this remove, from the bowels of the Welsh mountains, what must be the cherubinic choiring from their tops! It was a very simple-hearted affair, that concert, and well encouraged by a large and cordial audience, thanks mostly, perhaps, to the vigilance of the lady pickets stationed down the lane leading to the chapel, and quite into the street, with tickets for sale, who let no hesitating passers escape. I myself pleaded a sovereign in defence, but one of the fair pickets changed it with instant rapture, and I was left without excuse for the indecision in which I had gone out to see whether I would really go to the concert.

For the matter of that we were without excuse for staying on in Malvern, save that it was so very, very pleasant though so very, very dull. It was there, I think, that I formed the Spanish melon habit, which I indulged thereafter throughout that summer, till the fogs of London reformed me at end of September, when no more melons came from Spain. The average of Spanish melons in England is so much better than that of our cantaloupes at home that I advise all lovers of the generous fruit to miss no chance of buying them.The fruiterer who sold me my first in Malvern, said that in the palmy days of the place many Americans used to come, and he mentioned a New York millionaire of his acquaintance so confidently that I almost thought he was mine, and felt much more at home than before. I had more talk with this kind fruiterer than with any one else in Malvern, though I will not depreciate an interview with a jobbing mechanic from far Norfolk, who spent an afternoon washing our windows, and was conversible when once you started his torpid flow. He did not grasp ultra-Norfolk ideas readily, and he altogether lacked the brilliant fancy of the gay, rusty, frowsy ragged tramp who came one afternoon with a bunch of cat-tail rushes for sale, and who had vividly conceived of himself as a steel-polisher out of work. He might not have been mistaken; but if he was it could not spoil my pleasure in him, or in the weather which had now begun to be very beautiful, with blue skies almost cloudless, and quite agreeably hot. It being the 12th of August, a bank holiday fell on that day, and the town filled up with trippers (mysteriously much objected to in England), who seemed mostly lovers, and who arm in arm passed through our street. One indeed there was who passed without companionship, playing the accordeon, his eyes fixed in a rapture with his own music.

On several other days the town seemed the less reasoned resort of crowds of harmless young people, who perhaps thought they were seeing the world there, since it was the height of the Malvern season. They were at one time more definitely attracted by the Flower Show at the neighboring seat of a great nobleman, which was opened by his lady with due ceremonies, and which enjoyed a greater popular favor. I myself followed withthe trippers there, partly because I had long read of that kind of English thing without seeing it, and because in the spacious leisure of Malvern it was difficult to invent occupations that would fill the time between luncheon and dinner, even with an hour out for an afternoon nap.

It was just a pleasant drive to the nobleman’s place, and my progress was attended by a sentiment of circus-day in the goers and comers on foot and in fly, and the loungers strewn on the grass of the road-sides and the open lots. At the gate of the nobleman’s grounds, we paid a modest entrance, and there were still modester fees for several of the exhibits. One of these was a tent where under a strong magnifying-glass a community of ants were offering their peculiar domestic and social economy to the study of the curious. But, if I rightly remember, the pavilion which sheltered the flower-show was free to all who could walk through its sultry air without stifling; it was really not so much a show of flowers as of fruits and vegetables, which indeed bore the heat better. Another free performance was the rivalry, apparently of amateurs, in simple feats of carpentry and joiner-work as applied to fence-building; but this was of a didactic effect from which it was a relief to turn to the idle and useless adventures of the people who lost themselves in a maze, or labyrinthine hedge and shared the innocent hilarity of the spectators watching their bewilderment from a high ground hard by. All the time there was a band playing, which when it played a certain familiar rag-time measure was loudly applauded and forced to play it again and again. It was a proud moment for the exile from a country whose black step-children had contributed these novel motives to the world’s music, in the intervals of being lynched.

The scene was all very familiar and very strange, with qualities of a subdued county fair at home, but more ordered and directed than such things are with us. As I say, I had long known its like in literature, and I was now glad to find it so realistic. My pleasure in it overflowed when the nobleman who had lent his premises for the show, came walking out among the people, bareheaded, in a suit of summer gray, with his lady beside him, and paused to speak, amid the general emotion, with a neat old woman of humble class, whose hand his lady had shaken. That, I said to myself, was quite as it should be in its allegiance to immemorial tradition and its fidelity to fiction; it could have formed the initial moment of a hundred thousand English novels. If it could not have formed a like moment in American romance, it is because our millionaires, in their shyness of subpœnas or of interviews, do not yet open their private grounds for flower-shows. It needs many centuries to mellow the conditions for the effect I had witnessed, and we must not be impatient.

The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very mediæval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any comer in his misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun, with groups of people seriously, if somewhat awe-strickenly, enjoying themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude towards their superiors which must long delay a real classification of society with us.

When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I came to pay the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then added, “And two shillings for me,” I did not like it as well as my theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much, and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible law.

It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them. There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday afternoon, for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery door-yards and making believe to read.

The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it ran by a vast

BRITISH CAMP, SHOWING ROMAN INTRENCHMENTS

enclosure, which looked like a neglected nursery, losing itself in a forest beyond. But we had really chanced upon one of the most characteristic features of English civilization. This neglected nursery was in fact a plantation of all woodland growths, for a game-preserve where later the gentleman who owned it would have the pleasure of killing the wild things resorting to it. We came to it fresh from our satisfaction with another characteristic feature: a village of low houses fronting on a green common, where geese and sheep were grazing, and poultry were set about in coops in the grass. Children were playing over it; men were smoking at the doors, and women doubtless were working within. The evening fire sent up its fumes from the chimneys, and a savory smell of cooking was in the air. It all looked very sociable, and if a little squalid, not the less friendly for that reason. It is from our literary associations with such scenes that we derive our heartaches when we first leave our humble homes in America, where we have really no such villages, but only solitary farms, or bustling communities on the way to be business centres. A village like that could easily become a “Deserted Village,” and an image of it, reflected in Goldsmith’s dear and lovely poem, recurred to me from my far youth,

“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along,And the dread Indian chants his warlike song,”

and mixed with the reality as I drove through it.

The three great summits which are chief of the Malvern Hills are the Beacons of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire; and nearest the town they are everywhere traversed by the paths which the founders of the water-cure taught to stray over their undulationsin the fashion of the German spas, and on which the patients walked themselves into a wholesome glow after their douches, sprays, and drenches. They are very noble tops indeed, from which one may everywhere command a lordly prospect, but the most interesting, and the loftiest, is the Worcestershire Beacon, a brow of which the Britons fortified against the Romans. You can drive the greater part of the way to their earthwork, and if you make the climb to it you will not envy either enemy its possession. The views from it are enchanting, and the fortifications, with companies of sheep grazing sidelong on their glacis and escarpments, can still be easily traced by the eye of military science; but perhaps their chief attraction to the civilian is that they seem impregnable to the swarming flies which infest the road almost throughout its rise, and at the point where you leave your carriage are a quite indescribable pest. One could imagine the Romans hurrying up the steep to be rid of them, and beating the Britons out of their stronghold in order to secure themselves from the insect enemy on the breezy height. They must have bitten the bare legs of the legionaries fearfully and really rendered retreat impossible, while the Britons had no choice but to submit; for if it was at this point that the brave Caractacus surrendered with his following, rather than be forced down among those flies, he yielded to a military necessity, and I should be the last to blame him for it. I wondered how my driver was getting on among them, till I found that he had taken refuge in the opportune inn from which he issued, wiping his mouth, on my descent from the embattled height; but the inn could not have been there in the Roman times.

The best of the excursion was coming home by the Wyche, a tremendous cut through beetling walls ofrock, which are truly, in the old eighteenth-century literary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone. It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to the Grand Cañon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London. This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be happy, if you have an umbrella.

I could not praise too much the meteorological delightfulness of that fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves, except for the incursionary trippers, who were, after all, so transient. What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted their doorsshe could approach their spotless thresholds without wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.

If ever the tide of sickness sets back there—and somehow I wish it might—the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass the picturesqueness of those up and down hill streets of Malvern, or the easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water growths which I did interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked friendly if not familiar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a cultivated sufferer from our Priory Churchless land will have an endless charm.

At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in Malvern, and spending hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting graves without, and the vaguely remembering monuments within. But not among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the visitor that of

PRIORY CHURCH—SWAN POOL IN FOREGROUND

the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution of the monasteries. The good “Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight,” lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters, with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father’s head. Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman’s figure, on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of Birmingham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenth-century tiles which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly carven stalls with the grotesques of their underseats, and doubtless to do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without paying for it, and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still so fair and neat, and whyif her Hydropathy should fail at last to attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the home of Langland, the author of “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,” he could visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any friend of the poor.

WE made Worcester what amends we could for refusing to stop the night in her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvíí dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of “wottle-and-dab,” the dab being probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows—namely, that to have asmall teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking bowl of clay, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with mathematical precision. With difficulty I then followed our intelligent guide through every part of the wonderful establishment: from the places where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economical thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works, where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual perfectioning of the product through more than a hundred and fifty years, and where copies of itschefs-d’œuvreare assembled in dazzling variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.

It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was fortunate for us that

WORCESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHWEST

the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power, of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence, was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each other, with the eager grudge of travellers; and I suppose we would rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who wrote Charles I.’sEikon Basilike, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubillac, or effigies of King John and Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by the angler himself, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. “The organ is decorated in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty-two stops,” yet we thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral. I remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what remains to me of the exquisite “Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S. aisle of the nave”? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see the marriage contract of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, in the diocesan registrar’s office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting the cathedral, and is now represented by a remnant of his cuticle in the chapter-house.

My prevalent impression of the Worcester Cathedral is not so much one of beauty as one of interest, full,various, and important interest. Of course in our one poor afternoon we could not give the wonderful place more than an hour. We had for one thing to go and do some shopping, and the shops in Worcester are very fairly good. Then we tried for tea, but there seemed to be men drinking beer in the place; and though the proprietor hospitably drove them out, in honor of the lady of our party, yet we thought we would not have tea there, or indeed anywhere. We went rather for a rainy moment to a pretty public garden beside the Severn, where from a waterproof spread upon a stone seat we watched the flow of the river. It seemed a very damp river, but it must be remembered the weather was wet. For the rest, Worcester proved a city of trams, passing through rather narrow streets of tall modern houses, intersected by lanes of lesser and older houses, much more attractive. It was also a centre of torrential downpours, with refuges in doorways where one of us could wait while the other umbrellaed a wild way about in search of a personable public-house, and an eventual chop. Found, the public-house turned out brand-new, like a hotel in an American railroad centre, where in an upper chamber, dryer and warmer than the English wont, travelling-men sat eating, and the strangers were asked by a kind, plain girl if they would have tea with their chop. Did English people, then, of the lower middle non-conformist class, have tea with their meats? It seemed probable, and in compliance we reverted to the American custom of fifty years ago. If the truth must be told it was not very good, personal tea, but was of the quick-lunch general brew which one drinks scalding hot from steaming nickel-plated cylinders in our country-stations, with the conductor calling “All aboard!” at the door.

WORCESTER, FROM THE RIVER

It is a shame to be noting these silly exceptions to the grand and beautiful life which must abound in Worcester, if one only had the key to it. There looked charming houses here and there in the quiet streets and places, but the present must keep itself locked against the average touristry to which the past is open. Afterwards we visited the famous city again and again in history, where the reader will find our welcome awaiting him, from Peter de Montford, who pillaged the town in 1263, and Owen Glendower in 1401; from Henry VII. who beheaded there after the battle of Bosworth Field many citizens holding for hunchback Richard; from Queen Elizabeth who came in 1574 and was received at the White Ladies; from Prince Rupert who captured it and Essex who recaptured and plundered it and spoiled the cathedral; and from the two wicked Kings Charles, father and son, who each deserved to lose the battle each lost at Worcester. If the reader comes and goes by Sidbury Gate, he may easily make his entrance and exit by that approach, where the first Charles’s friends upset the wagon-load of hay which kept his pursuers from overtaking and taking him in his flight from the battle-field above the city. The storied, or the fabled, hay is always there, if you do not know the place.

The August day we left Malvern, and stayed for a drive through Hereford on our way to Shrewsbury, was bright and hot, and Hereford was responsively sultry and dusty. Except for its beautiful cathedral, Hereford is not apparently interesting, though it may really be interesting. It certainly is historically interesting; and if one likes to find one’s self in a place which was considerable in 584, and sent a bishop to the synod of St. Augustine seventeen years later, there is Hereford for the choosing. Otherwise it looks a dull, slovenly large market-townwhich has not been swept since the last market-day. It has, indeed, the merit of a fine old Tudor house between three intersecting streets and now devoted to a banking business, and I will not pretend that I did not enjoy, quite as much as I enjoyed the cathedral, the old almshouse which we visited somewhere on the length of a mighty long street. A longer, dustier, flatter and hotter street I have not known outside of Ferrara, where all the streets are like that. It must have been in default of other attractions that we were so strenuous about seeing the Coningsby Hospital for old soldiers and servants, but at any rate I am now glad we went. For one thing we should not have known what else to do till our train left for Shrewsbury, and for another it was really very nice to learn what old soldiership or old butlership could come to late in life in that England of snug retreats for so many sorts of superannuation. The kindly inmate who showed me about the place was hurrying himself into a red coat when we stopped at the outer door, and as he proved an old servant and not an old soldier, I thought he might have worn something of a cooler color, say Kendall-green, on such a day. But there was no other fault in him, and if I had been the nobleman who appointed him to that disoccupation after a life-long menial employment, I might well have thought twice before choosing some other domestic of my train. He led me about the thirsty garden, where the vegetables panted among their droughty flower-borders, and had me view not only the Norman archway of the old commandery of the Knights Templars, now spanning a space of pot herbs, but the ruins of the Black Friars’ priory drooping in the heat. Something incongruous in it all tormented the spirit, but how to have it otherwise probably the spirit could not havesaid. It was better in the cloistered approaches to the pensioners’ quarters, cool and dim under the low ceiling, and I shall always be sorry that I pretended a hurry, and did not view the rooms of my guide. I thought I could do that, any time, in the insensate superstition of the postponing traveller, and now, how far I am from Hereford, recording these vain regrets in the top of a towering New York hotel, overlooking the Hudson!

Or is it rather the Wye? The Wye runs, or slowly, slowly creeps through Hereford, under a most beautiful bridge, which I do not know but you cross in going to the station. I had, or I ought to have had, long thoughts in that dreamy old town, where I would now so willingly pass all the rest of my worst enemy’s life; for it was the market-town of my ancestors, and thither, I dare say, my Welsh-flannel manufacturing great-grandfather sent his goods, as to a bustling metropolis where they would bring the largest price. But at this distance of time, who knows? I hope at least they went by the river Wye in barges laden at his little Breconshire town, and floated either up or down the stream; I do not know which way the Wye runs from The Hay, and in this sort of purely literary reverie it does not matter. What really matters is to get these Welsh flannels into the hands of some mercer in Hereford, and then leave them and go again to the cathedral, which is so beautiful, and so full of bishops, now no longer living. Your foot knocks against their monuments at every step; but the great glory of the cathedral is in its mighty tower, massing itself to heaven from the midst, and looking best, I fancy, from the outside of the church. Only, there, when you have left your fly in the shade of the great chestnuts (I hope they are chestnuts), you will have to run across the blazing pavement if you wish toreach the cathedral alive in that fierce Hereford sun. Before I leave it for another flight to our fly, I wish to bear testimony to the exceptional intelligence of the verger showing us about, in whom I vainly sought a likeness to the verger who twenty years earlier had guided my steps among the tombs of those multitudinous bishops. At that tune I had lately read in an Ecclesiastical Directory of the United Kingdom that a newer canon of the cathedral was of my own name; and I asked the verger if he could show me his seat in the choir. He did so at once, and incidentally noted, “Many’s the ’alf-crown I’ve ’ad from ’im, sir,” when, such is the honor one bears one’s name, I too gave him a half-crown at parting. Had I perhaps been meaning to give him sixpence?

We were sheltered from the sun at last when we started for Shrewsbury, in a train which began almost at once to run between wooded hills under a sky that constantly cleared, constantly clouded, through a country that had been expelled from Eden along with Adam and Eve. It was still very hot, on the outskirts of the afternoon, when we reached Shrewsbury, and drove to the Raven, which we called a bird of prey because it wanted certain shillings for two large, cool rooms, though we should be glad now to pay twice their sum. How haught the spirit grows when once it has tasted the comparative cheapness of English inns! We alleged Chester, we alleged Plymouth, we alleged Liverpool, in expostulation, but the Raven would only offer us two smaller and warmer rooms for fewer shillings, and so we drove to another hotel. We got two fair chambers there with loaded casements, for much less money, and we looked from our pretty windows down upon the green at the foot of St. Mary’s Church, and as far up itsheaven-climbing tower as we could crane our necks to see. I can give no idea of our content in that proximity; it was as if we had the lovely and venerable edifice all to ourselves, and as we listened to the music in which it struck the hour and the next quarter of it, our hearts sang in unison with a holy and tasteful joy.

But it seemed as if, though a sultry afternoon at Hereford,

“The day increased from heat to heat,”

in its decline at Shrewsbury. We made a long evening of it before we tried to sleep, and then our joy in the chimed quarters of St. Mary’s clock was still tasteful, but not so holy as it had been at first. The bells had miraculously transferred themselves to the interior of our rooms, which were transformed into deeply murmuring belfries; and we discovered that there were not four but twenty-four quarters in every hour. These were computed by one stroke for the first quarter, two for the next, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on until about a thousand strokes told the final quarter in the twenty-four. In the mean time the heat broke in a passion of rain. A thunder-storm came on, and having the whole night before it, and being quite at leisure, it bellowed and flashed till daylight, when it retired from the scene and left it as hot as ever, and a great deal closer.

If the entire truth must be told, in that old border-town which, after an inarticulate Roman antiquity, had held back the Welsh from England for nearly a thousand years, and finally witnessed the triumph of the Red Rose over the White in the fight where Hotspur Harry fell, we had been allured by the delicious incongruity of seeing “The Belle of New York” in the most alien of all possible environments. We had never seen the piece in its native city; money could not there have overcome our instinct of its abominable vulgarity, but here in a strange land (if our English friends will let us call it so for the sake of the antithesis) we made it an act of patriotism to go. We bought two proud front seats, and found our way to them before a risen curtain, to realize too late that until its fall there was no retreat for us. The theatre at Shrewsbury is not large, under the best of circumstances, and that night it was smaller than ever. Such was the favor of “The Belle of New York” with that generous population, that every seat in the orchestra was taken, and the walls of the edifice pressed suffocatingly inwards. On the stage the heat was so concentrated that in the glare of the foot-lights the faces of the performers steamed with perspiration through the grease-paint of their faces, as they swayed and sang, and leaped and bounded in obedience to the dramatist and composer, and delivered our New York slang in a cockney convention of our local accent which seemed entirely to satisfy the preconceptions of Shrewsbury. Altogether, the piece enjoyed an acceptance with the audience which, in the welding heat, was so little less than stifling that the adventurous strangers, at the close of an act that lasted as long as a Greek trilogy, escaped into the street with what was left of their lives. I know that it is making an exorbitant demand upon the credulity of the reader to relate that upon their return to Shrewsbury a week later these strangers again went to see an American play in the same theatre, which seemed to have been greatly enlarged in the interval, and so deliciously lowered in temperature that in their balcony seats they all but shivered through a melodrama ofNew York life professing to have been written by Joseph Jefferson. There was an escape of the hero from prison in one scene, and in another a still narrower escape from drowning in the East River at the hands of perhaps the worst reprobate who ever came to a bad end on the stage; and there was a set (I think it is called) of the Brooklyn Bridge, which though attenuated and almost spectralized, recalled the reality as measurably as the English Bobby in blue recalled the massive Irish-American guardians of our public security. The “Shadows of a Great City” did not convince us of our dear and now-lamented Jefferson’s authorship; but it was not so unbearable as “The Belle of New York,” for meteorological reasons, if not for others, and upon the whole it interested, it flattered the mind to the fond conjecture that here in this ancient, this beautiful town, the American drama, if finally neglected in its own land, might be welcomed to a prosperous and honored exile.

St. Mary’s Church was so near at hand that it could hardly fail of repeated visits, and it merited a veneration which might have been more instructed but could not have been more sincere than ours. In every author who treats of it the riches of its stained glass is celebrated, and I will not dwell upon its beauties or even its quaint simplicities. The church is as old as Norman architecture can make it, and it invites with a hundred interesting facts, so that I hardly know how to justify the specific attraction which one piece of modern sculpture there had from me above all other things. The tomb of General Curston by Westonscott has not even the claim of being within the church, where so many memorable and immemorable dead are remembered. It is in the square basement of the tower,and the soldier’s figure is on your right as you enter. He was perhaps not much known to history, being only an adjutant-general, who fell in battle with the Sikhs at Runneggar in 1848, but no one who looks upon his countenance in the living stone can forget it. His left hand rests at his side; his right lies on his heart holding his sword; his soldier’s cloak opens, showing his medals. In the realistically treated face, with its long drooping mustache and whiskers, is a look of dreamy melancholy which, whatever the other qualities of the work, is a masterpiece of expression. Of a period when the commonplace asserted itself with a positive force almost universal in the arts, this simple monument is of classic beauty.

As quaint as any of the earliest inscriptions on the monuments of the church is the tablet in the outer wall of the tower to the bold eighteenth-century aëronaut who came to his death in an endeavored flight from its top to the farther bank of the Severn. It appears that in this as in some other matters—

“Not only we, the latest seed of time,That in the flying of a wheel cry downThe past—”

have excelled or even failed. Nor is it probable that the bold youth who perished in 1759 was the first to try imperfect wings in the region where none have yet triumphed; and the faith of his epitapher is not less touching than that of the many who survive to our own day in the belief of antemortem aërostation.

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