XTHE CHARM OF CHESTER

“Old Harvard’s scholar-factories red,”

showing on the other hand in the college enclosures, he said it was all very like Oxford. He must have felt the moral likeness, the spiritual likeness, as I did in Oxford, for physical or meteorological likeness there is none absolutely. It is something in the ambient ether, in the temperament, in the unity of high interests, in the mystical effluence from minds moving with a certain dirigibility in the upper regions, but controlled by invisible ties, in each case, to a common centre. It is theprevalence of scholarship, which characterizes the respective municipalities and which holds the civic bodies in a not ungraceful, not ungrateful subordination.

Something of the hereditary grudge between town and gown descended to Harvard from the English centres of learning; but the prompt assertion of town government as the sole police force forbade with us the question of jurisdictions which it is said still confuses the parties with a feeling of enmity at Oxford. The war of fists following the war of swords and daggers, which in the earliest times left the dead of both sides in the streets after some mortal clash, and kept each college a stronghold, even after that war had no longer a stated or formal expression, is forever past, but still the town and the gown in their mutual dependence hold themselves aloof in mutual antipathy. So I was told, but probably on both sides the heritage of dislike resides only in the youthfuler breasts, and is of the quality of those ideals which perpetuate hazing in our colleges, or which among boys pass forms of mischief and phases of superstition along on a certain level of age. All customs and usages are presently uninteresting, as one observes them from the outside, and can be precious on the inside only as they are endeared by association. What is truly charming is some expression of the characteristic spirit such as in Oxford forbids one of the colleges to part in fee with a piece of ground on which a certain coveted tree stands, but which allows it to lease that beautiful feature of the landscape to a neighboring college. A thing like that is really charming, and has forever the freshness of a whimsical impulse, where whimsical impulses of many sorts must have abounded without making any such memorable sign.

In the reticence of the place all sorts of silent character will have been accumulating through the centuries until now the sum of it must be prodigious. But that is a kind of thing which if one has any direct knowledge of it one feels to be a kind of confidence, and which one lets one’s conjecture play about, in the absence of knowledge, very guardedly. For my part I prefer to leave quite to the reader’s imagination the charming traits of the acquaintance I would fain have made my friends. Sometimes they were of difficult conversation, but not more so than certain Old Cambridge men, whom I remembered from my youth; the studious life is nowhere favorable to the cultivation of the smaller talk; but now that so many of the Fellows are married the silence is less unbroken, and the teas, if not the dinners, recur in a music which is not the less agreeable for the prevalence of the soprano or the contralto note. It seemed to me that there were a good many teas, out-doors when it shone and in-doors when it rained, but there were never enough, and now I feel there were all too few. They had theentouragewhich the like social dramas cannot have for yet some centuries in our centres of learning; between the tinkle of the silver and the light clash of the china one caught the muted voices of the past speaking from the storied architecture, or the immemorial trees, or even the secular sward underfoot. But one must not suppose that the lawns which are velvet to one’s tread are quite voluntarily velvet. I was once sighing enviously to a momentary host and saying of his turf that nothing but the incessant play of the garden-hose could keep the grass in such vernal green with us, when he promptly answered that the garden-hose had also its useful part in the miracle of his own lawn. I dared not ask if the lawnmower likewise lent its magic; that would have been

OXFORD—LOOKING UP THE ISISH. W. Taunt & Co.

OXFORD—LOOKING UP THE ISIS

H. W. Taunt & Co.

going too far. Or at least I thought so; and in the midst of the surrounding reticences I always felt it was better not to push the bounds of knowledge.

There is so much passive erudition, hived from the flowers of a thousand summers in such a place of learning, that I felt the chances were that if the stranger came there conscious of some of his own little treasure of honey, he would find it a few thin drops beside the rich stores of any first apiarist to whom he opened it. In that long, long quiet, that illimitable opportunity, that generously defended leisure, the scholarship is not only deep, but it is so wide that it may well include the special learning of the comer, and he may hear that this or that different don who is known for a master in a certain kind has made it his recreation to surpass in provinces where the comer’s field shrinks to parochial measure. How many things they keep to themselves at Oxford, it must remain part of one’s general ignorance not to know, and it is more comfortable not to inquire. But out of the sense of their guarded, their hidden, lore may spring the habit of referring everything to the university, which represents them as far as they can manage not to represent it. They may have imaginably outlived our raw passion of doing, and have become serenely content with being. This is a way of saying an illanguagible thing, and, of course, oversaying it.

The finer impressions of such a place—there is no other such in the world unless it is Cambridge, England, or Old Cambridge, Massachusetts,—escape the will to impart them. The coarser ones are what I have been giving the reader, and trying to pass off upon him in their fragility for something subtile. If one could have stayed the witchery of an instant of twilight in a collegequadrangle, or of morning sunshine in a college garden, or of a glimpse of the High Street with the academic walls and towers and spires richly foreshortened in its perspective, or of the beauty of some meadow widening to the level Isis, or the tender solemnity of a long-drawn aisle of trees leading to the stream under the pale English noon, and could now transfer the spell to another, something worth while might be done. But short of this endeavor is vain. There was a walk, which I should like to distinguish from others, all delightful, where we passed in a grassy field over an old battle-ground of the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, and saw traces of the old lager-beads, the earthworks in which the hostile camps pushed closer and closer to each other, and left the word “loggerheads” to their language. But I do not now find this very typical, and I am rather glad that the details of my sojourn are so inextricably interwoven that I need not try to unravel the threads which glow so rich a pattern in my memory.

BECAUSE Chester is the handiest piece of English antiquity for new Americans to try their infant teeth on, I had fancied myself avoiding it as unworthy my greater maturity. I had not now landed in Liverpool, and as often as I had hitherto landed there before, I had proudly disobeyed the charge of more imperfectly travelled friends to be sure and break the run to London at Chester, for there was nothing like it in all England. Having indulged my haughty spirit for nearly half a century, one of the sudden caprices which undermine the firmest resolutions determined me to pass at Chester the day which must intervene before the steamer I was going to meet at Liverpool was due. Naturally I did everything I could to difference myself from the swarm of my crude countrymen whom I found there, and I was rewarded at the delightful restaurant in the Rows, where I asked for tea in my most carefully guarded chest-notes, with a pot of the odious oolong which observation has taught the English is most acceptable to the palate of our average compatriots, when they cannot get green tea or Japan tea. Perhaps it was my mortifying failure in this matter which fixed me in my wish never to be taken for an Englishman, except by other Americans whom it was easy to deceive.

The Americans abounded in Chester, not only on thepresent occasion but in my three successive chance visits to the place; and if they were by an immense majority nearly all of the same sex, they were none the worse for that. By pretty twos, by pretty threes, by yet larger lovely groups, and, in serious, middle-aged instances, singly, they wandered in and out of the plain old cathedral; they strayed through the Rows or arcades by which Chester distinguishes herself from other cities in having two-storied sidewalks; they clustered in the shops where the prices were adjusted to their ignorance of English values and they could pay as much for a pair of gloves as in New York or Chicago; they crowded the narrow promenade which tops the city wall; they haunted the historic houses, where they strayed whispering about with their Baedekers shut on their thumbs, attentive to the instruction of the custodians; they rode on the tops of the municipal tram-cars with apparently no apprehension from their violation of the sacred American principle of corporational enterprise in transportation; they followed on foot the wanderings of the desultory streets; at the corners and before the quainter façades the sun caught the slant of their lifted eye-glasses and flashed them into an involuntary conspicuity. In all his round I doubt if his ray could have visited countenances of a more diffused intelligence, expressive of a more generous and truly poetic interest in those new things of the old English world on which they were now feeding full the longing, and realizing rapturously the dreaming, of the years and years of vague hopes. I could read from my own past the pathos of some lives, restricted and remote, to which the present opportunity was like a glad delirium, a glory of unimagined chance, in which they trod the stones of Old Chester as if they were the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. These

WATER-TOWER AND ROMAN REMAINS

and such as these have forever the better of those born to the manner; as for those assuming to be naturalized to the manner, they are not worthy to be confounded with such envoys from the present to the past. It is only the newest Americans who ever really see England, and they are apt to see it in the measure of that simplicity for which sincerity is by no means a satisfactory substitute.

It could well be in a passion of humility that a sophisticated traveller might wish to hide himself from them in the depths of that Roman bath which apparently so few visitors to Chester see. We found it with some difficulty, by the direction of a kindly shop-woman who, though she had lived all her life opposite, could only go so far as to say she believed it was under a certain small newspaper and periodical store across the way. Asking the young man we found there, he owned the fact, and leaving a yet younger man in charge, he lighted a stump of candle, and led to a sort of cavern back of his shop, where the classic relic, rude but unmistakable, was. Rough, low pillars supported the roof and the modern buildings overhead, and the bath, clumsily shaped of stone, attested the civilization once dominant in Chester. Our guide had his fact or his fable concerning the spring which supplied the bath; but whether it is in summer or in winter that this spring almost wholly disappears, I am ashamed not to remember.

The Rome that was built upon Britain underlies so much of England that if one begins to long for its excavation one must be willing to involve so much mediæval and modern superstructure in a common ruin that one’s wisdom must be doubted. So far as the Roman remains showed themselves to a pretty ignorant observer they did not seem worth digging out in theirentirety; here and there an example seems to serve; they are the unpolished monuments of life in a remote and partially settled province, not to be compared, except at Bath and York, with those of Pompeii or Herculaneum. To be sure, if one knew they underlay New York, one would gladly level all the sky-scrapers in the town, that they might be given to the light. But in Chester it is another matter. There is already an interesting if not satisfactory collection of antiquities in Chester; and if it came to question of demolishing the delightful old wall, or the Rows, with God’s Providence House, and Bishop Lloyd’s House, or even the cathedral, though it is, to my knowledge, the least sympathetic of English cathedrals, one would wish to think twice. At the wall, especially, one would like to hesitate, walking perhaps all the way round the city on it, and pausing at discreet intervals to repose and ponder. It does not convince everywhere of an equal antiquity; there are parts that are evidently restorations and parts that are reproductions, and the gates frankly own themselves modern. But there are towers that moulder and bastions that have plainly borne the brunt of time. In the circuit of the wall you may look down on the roofs of old Chester within, and that much larger and busier new Chester without, which stretches with its shops and mills and suburban cottages and villas into the pretty country, as far as you like. But our affair was never with that Chester; except where the country began under the walls, and widened away beyond the river Dee, with bridges and tramways presently lost to the eye in the shadow of pleasant groves, we cared for nothing beyond the walls. There were places where these dropped sheer to the waters of the Dee, which obliged us at one point of its flow with a vivid rapid, or(I will not be sure) the swift slope of a dam, where a man stood midway casting his line into the ripple. He could by some stretch of the imagination have been a Jolly Miller who lived on the river Dee, though I remember no mills in sight; and by an equal stroke of fancy, he could have been casting his line for the salmon with which the sands of Dee are also associated in song. I do not insist that the reader shall hazard either conjecture with me; but what I say is that all England is so closely netted over and embroidered with literary reminiscence, with race-memories, from the earliest hours of personal consciousness, that wherever the American goes his mind catches in some rhyme, some phrase, some story of fact or fable that makes the place more home to him than the house where he was born. That is the sweetness, the kindness of travel in England, and that is the enchanting strangeness. To other lands we relate ourselves by an effort, but there the charm lies waiting for us, to seize us and hold us fast with ties running to the inmost and furthermost of our earthly being.

At one point in our first ramble on the wall at Chester we came to a house built close upon it, of such quaintness and demureness that it needed no second glance, in the long June twilight, to convince us that one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines lived there; or if it did, no possible doubt of the fact could be left when we encountered at the descent to the next city gate the smartest of red-coated sergeants mounting the wall to go and pay court to her. Afterwards we found many houses level with the top of the wall, with little gardened door-yards or leafy spaces beside them. I do not say they all had Hardy heroines in them; there were not sergeants enough for that; but the dwellings were allof an insurpassable quaintness and demureness, or only less quaint and less demure than the first. One of the most winning traits of the past wherever you find it is its apparent willingness to be friends with the present, to make room for it when it can, and to respond as far as possible to its commonplace and even sordid occasions. Like old walls that I had known in Italy, the old wall at Chester lent itself not only to the domestic but the commercial demands of to-day, and if the shops which it allowed to front upon its promenade were preferably those of dealers in bric-à-brac and second-hand books, still the principle is the same. In one of these shops was an old (it looked old) sundial which tempted and tempted the poor American, who knew very well he could not get it home without intolerable inconvenience and expense; and who tore himself from it at last with the hope of returning another day and carrying it all the way, if need be, to New York in his arms. As is the custom of sundials it professed to number only the sunny hours; but he had (or is this his subsequent invention?) the belief that somewhere on its round was indelibly if invisibly marked that gloomy moment of the September afternoon when King Charles looked from the Phœnix Tower hard by the shop where the dial lurked, and saw his army routed by the Parliamentarians on Rowton Moor. To be sure the moment was bright for the Parliamentarians; there is the consolation in every defeat that it is the victory of at least one side, and in this instance it was the right side which won.

You are advised that if you would see Chester Cathedral aright you had best look at it across the grassy space which lies between it and the wall near Phœnix Tower. It is indeed finest there, for it is a fane that asks distance, and if you go visit it by the pale twilight

KING CHARLES’S TOWER

at nine o’clock of the long June day, the brown stone it is built of will remind you less than it might at noon-day of the brown-stone fronts of the old New York streets. But who am I that I should criticise even the material body of any English cathedral? If we had this one of Chester in the finest American city, in Boston itself, we should throng to it with our guide-books if not our prayer-books, and would not allow that any ecclesiastical structure in the country compared with it. All that I say to my compatriots of either sex, who come to its Perpendicular Gothic fresh from the Oblique Doric of their Cunarders or White Stars at Liverpool, is: “Wait! Do not lavish your precipitate raptures all upon this good but plain edifice. Keep some of them rather for the gentler and lovelier dreams of architecture at Wells, at Ely, at Exeter, and supremely the minster at York, to which you should not come impoverished of the emotions you have been storing up from the beginning of your æsthetic consciousness. Yet, stay! Forbear to turn slightingly from your first cathedral because some one tells you it is not the best. It will have more to say to that precious newness of yours (you cannot yet realize how precious your newness is) than fairer temples shall to your more shop-worn sensibility.” It is always well in travel to cherish the first moments of it, for these are richer in potentialities of joy than any that can follow; and it is doubtless in the wise order of Providence that such a city as Chester should lie so near the great port of entry for three hundred thousand Americans that they may have something worthy of their emotions while they have still their sea-legs on, and may reel under the stroke without causing suspicion.

I have said how constantly one met them, how inevitably; and if they were wondering, willingly or unwillingly, what Chester could be bought for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but the walls and gates must be included.

Why should such a thing be impossible? Such a thing on a smaller scale, different in quantity but not in quality, had been dreamt of by a boldly imaginative Chicagoan, if we could believe the good woman in charge of the Derby House, up the little court out of Nicholas Street, where all that is left of the old town mansion of the noble Stanleys remains. This magnanimous dreamer had the vision of the Stanleys’ town-house transplanted to the shores of Lake Michigan, and erected as a prime feature of the great Columbian Fair. He offered to buy it in fulfilment of his vision, so ran the tale, of whoever then could sell it; but when the head of the family to which it once belonged heard of the offer, he bought it himself in a quiver of indignation conceivably lasting yet, and dedicated it to the public curiosity forever, on the spot where its timbered and carven gables have looked into a dingy little court ever since the earliest days of Tudor architecture. If we could trust the witness of the cards which strewed the good woman’s table, it was American curiosity which mainly wreaked itself on the beautiful but rather uninhabitable old house our Chicagoan failed to buy. By hungry hundreds they throng to the place, and begin to satisfytheir life-long famine for historic scenes in the mansion where Charles the First sojourned while in Chester, and whence the head of the house was taken out to die by the axe for his part in the royalist rising of 1657. So, in my rashness, I should have believed, but for the correction of Mr. Havell Crickmore, who says, in his pleasantly written and pleasantly pictured book about “Old Chester,” that the Earl was “beheaded during the great Rebellion,” which would shorten his life by some ten years, and make his death date 1647, not 1657. It does not greatly matter now; he would still be dead, at either date, and at either a touch of heroic humor would survive him in the story Mr. Crickmore repeats. Colonel Duckenfield of the Cromwellian forces asked him if he had no friend who would do the last office for him. “Do you mean, to cut my head off? Nay, if those men who would have my head off cannot find one to cut it off, let it stand where it is.”

I have always liked to believe everything I read in guide-books, or hear from sacristans or custodians. In Chester you can believe not only the bleak Baedeker, with its stern adherence to fact, but anything that anybody tells you; and in my turn I ask the unquestioning faith of the reader when I assure him that he will find nothing so mediæval-looking out of Nuremberg as that street—I think it is called Eastgate Street—with its Rows, or two-story sidewalks, and its timber-gabled shops with their double chance of putting up the rates on the fresh American. Let him pay the price, and gladly, for there is no perspective worthier his money. I am not in the pay of a certain pastry-cook of the Rows, who makes the wedding-cakes for all the royal marriage feasts; but I say he will serve you a toasted tea-cake with the afternoon oolong he will try to putoff on an American, such as you cannot buy elsewhere in England; only, you must be sure to eat the bottom half of the tea-cake, because most of the rich, sweet Cheshire butter will have melted tenderly into that. Go then, if you will, to the cathedral which I have been vainly seeking to decry, and study its histories, beginning with the remnants of the original Norman church of the Conqueror’s lieutenant and nephew Hugh Lupus, and ending with a distinctly modern restoration of the mediæval carvings in the eastern transept, wherein Disraeli and Gladstone are made grotesquely to figure, the one in building up the Indian Empire and the other in disestablishing the Irish Church. Somewhere in the historical middle distance are certain faded flags taken from the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, which we should always have won if our powder had not given out, and let the enemy capture these banners. The beauty of the Chapter House will subdue you, if you rebel against the sight of them, and I can certify to the solemnity of the Cloister, which I visited with due impression; but with what success a young girl was sketching a perspective of the cathedral I did not look over her shoulder to see.

How perverse is memory! I cannot recall distinctly the prospect across the Dee from the Watergate to which the Dee use to float its ships and from which it now shrinks far beyond the green flats. But I remember that in returning through a humble street from the Watergate, the children on the door-steps were eating the largest and thickest slices of bread and butter I saw in all England, where the children in humble streets are always eating large, thick slices of bread and butter. For the pleasure of riding on the municipal trams, and of realizing how much softer and slower they run thanour monopolistic trolleys, we made, whenever we had nothing else to do, an excursion “across the sands of Dee” by the bridge which spans its valley, with always fragments of Kingsley’s tender old song singing themselves in the brain, and with the visionary Mary going to call the cattle home, and the cruel, crawling foam from which never home came she.

Oh, is it fish, or weed, or floating hair,

in the tide that no longer laps the green floor that once was sand? Ask the young girls of fifty years ago, who could make people cry with the words! It was enough for me that I was actually in the scene of the tragedy, and more than all the British, Roman, Saxon, or Norseman antiquity of Chester. At the suburban extremity of the tram-line, or somewhere a little short of it, we were offered by sign-board a bargain in house-lots so phrased that it added thirty generations to the age of a region already old enough in all conscience. We were not invited to buy the land brutally in fee-simple, outright; but it was intimated that the noble or gentle family to which it belonged would part with it temporarily on a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years. I hope we fully felt the delicacy, the pathos in that reservation of the thousandth year, which was the more appealing because it was tacit.

These lots were no part of the vast estate of the great noble whose seat lies farther yet out of Chester in much the same direction. It was one of the many aristocratic houses which I meant to visit in England, but as I really visited no other, I am glad that I gave way in the matter of a shilling to the driver of the fly who held that the drive to the place was worth that much morethan I did. I tried hard for the odd shilling, as an affair of conscience and of public spirit; but the morning was of a cool-edged warmth, and of a sky that neither rained nor shone, and the driver of the fly was an elderly man who looked as if he would not lie about the regular price, though I pretended so strenuously it should be six and not seven shillings for the drive, and I yielded. After all (I excused my weakness to myself), it would have been seven dollars at home; and presently we were in the leafy damp, the leafy dark of the parkway within the gates of the great nobleman’s estate beyond the Dee. Eight thousand acres large it stretches all about, and is visibly bounded only by the beautiful Welsh hills to the westward, and four miles we drove through the woodsy quiet of the park, which was so much like the woodsy quiet of forest-ways not so accessible at home. Birds were singing in the trees, and on the hawthorns a little may hung yet, though it was well into June. Rabbits—or if they were hares I mean no offence to the hares—limped leisurely away from the road-side. Coops of young pheasants, carefully bringing up to be shot in the season for the pleasure of noble or even royal guns, were scattered about in the borders of the shade; and grown cock and hen pheasants showed their elect forms through the undergrowth in the conscious pride of a species dedicated to such splendid self-sacrifice. In the open spaces the brown deer by scores lay lazily feeding, their antlers shining, or their ears pricking through the thin tall stems of the grass. Otherwhere in paddock or pasture, were two-year-olds or three-year-olds, of the blooded hunters or racers to whose breeding that great nobleman is said to be mostly affectioned, though for all I personally know he may be more impassioned of the fine arts, or have his whole

CHESTER CASTLE

heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do personally know is that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless fly, and escaped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own responsive nerves vibrating.

From time to time notices to the public “earnestly requested” the visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England, and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit themselves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circumstance proper to a great English nobleman’s place, no one can say; and if I mention that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful houses appropriated to the immediate dependants of this nobleman, it is less with the purpose of instructing some future oil-king or beef-baron in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.

As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace, it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it with vague preconceptions of another sort of majesty. I myself was disappointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect to be Norman, “or at least Early English,” but which one finds a low two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground, with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance disguised as a small classic temple. But thecastle is in the definite taste of a self-justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated Georgian—the Fourth Georgian—surviving into our own century not so very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satisfaction in the silvery sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror appointed to hold Chester for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.

I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the formalities of cropt lawns and clipt trees, and I would fain have the reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its belongings, so that in passing a certain bust with the familiar broken nose of the master he respectfully murmured,“Sir Michael Hangelo.”

“Who?” the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of the precious fact; and the good soul repeated,

“Sir MichaelHangelo, sir.”

Of course it was Sir Michelangelo, Bart.; nothing so low as the effigy of a knight could be admitted to that august gallery.

Am I being a little too scornful in all this? I hope not, though I own that in the mansions of the great it is difficult not to try despising them. The easy theory about a man whom you find magnificently housed in the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it. In your generous indignation you wish to have him out, and his pleasure-grounds divided up into small farms. But this is a kind of equity which may be as justly applied to any one who owns more of the earth than he knows how to use. Who are they that fence large parts of Long Island, and much of the Hudson River scenery, which they have studded with villas never open to the public like that great house near Chester? I know a man who has two acres and a half on the Maine shore of the Piscataqua, and tills not a tenth of it; but I should be sorry to have him expropriated from the rest. We all, who have the least bit more than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another matter. They are the immense majority and they may vote anything they choose, even a cruel injustice.

The American, newly arrived in Chester after his newarrival in Liverpool, will be confronted with a stronghold of the past which he will not be able to overthrow perhaps during his whole stay in England, though he should spend the summer. Immemorial custom is intrenched there not only in the picturesqueness, the beauty, the charm, but the silent inexpugnable possession which time from the beginning has been fortifying. The outside has been made as goodly as possible, but within is the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and toil. Yet let him not rashly fling himself against its impregnable defences. It is not primarily his affair. Let him go quietly about with his Baedeker, and see and enjoy all he can of that ancient novelty, so dear to us new folk, and then when he is worn out with his pleasure, and sits down to his toasted tea-cake in that restaurant of the Rows where they will serve him a cup of our national oolong, let him ask himself how far the beloved land he has left has been true to its proclamations in favor of a fresh and finally justTheilung der Erde.

Having answered this question to his satisfaction, let him by no means hurry away from Chester that night or the next morning in the vain belief that greater historic riches await him in cities, farther away from his port of entry, in the heart of the land. Scarcely any shall surpass it, for if not a Roman capital like York or London, it was long a Roman camp, and a temple of Apollo replaced a Druid temple on the site of the present cathedral. The Britons were never pushed farther off than the violet hills where they still dwell, strong in their unintelligible tongue, with a taste for music and mysticism which seems never to have failed them. From those adjacent heights they harried in frequent foray their Roman and Saxon and Norman invaders,and only left off attacking Chester when the Early English had become the Later.

Chester was not only one of the stubbornest of the English cities in its resistance of William the Conqueror, but it held out still longer against Oliver the Conqueror in the war of the King and the Parliament. What part, if any, it had in the Wars of the Roses, I excuse myself for not knowing. The strong Henry Fourth led the weak Richard Second a captive through it, and there is record that the weaker Henry Sixth tried in vain to recruit his forces in it for his futile struggle with fate. The lucky Henry Seventh who had newly married royalty, and was no more king by right than the pretender who afterwards threatened his throne, sent a Stanley to the block for having spoken tolerantly of Perkyn Warbeck. But if there was any party in Chester for that pretender, there was none for the Stuart calling himself Charles III., for when he sent from Scotland an entreaty to the citizens for help, they took it as a warning to fortify their town against him. After that they had peace, and now the place is the great market for Cheshire cheese which is made in the fertile country round about, and vies with the New Jersey imitation in the favor of our own country.

The American who means to stop in Chester for the day, which may so profitably and pleasantly extend itself to a week, cannot do better than instruct himself more particularly in the history which I still find myself so ignorant, for all my show of learning. I would have him distrust this at every point, and correct it from better authorities. Especially I would have him mistrust a story told in Chester of the American who discovered a national origin in the guide-book’s mention of one of the Mercian kings who extended his rule so farfrom the midland counties. The traveller read the word American, and pronounced it as the English believe we all do. “My dear,” he said to his wife, “this town was settled by the ’Murricans.”

FROM the 10th to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fortnight, with a peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was why we left London, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.

Our run was through a country which frankly confessed a long drouth, such as parches the fields at home in exceptional summers. Rain had not fallen during the heat from which we were escaping, and the grain had been cut and stacked in unwonted safety from mould. There is vastly more wheat grown in England than the simple American, who expects to find it a large market-garden, imagines, and the yield was now so heavy that the stacked sheaves served to cover half the space from which they had been reaped. The meadow-lands were burned by the sun almost as yellow as the stubble; the dry grass along the railroad banks had caught fire from the sparks of the locomotive, and the flames had run through the hedges, into the pasturage and stubble, and at one place they had kindled the stacks of wheat, which farm-hands were pulling apart and beating out. The air was full of the pleasant smell of their burning, and except that the larkswere spiring up into the dull-blue sky, and singing in the torrid air, it was all very like home.

I ventured to say as much to the young man whom I found sleeping in the full blaze of the sun in his corner of our carriage, and to whom I apologized for the liberty I had taken in drawing his curtain so as to shade his comely fresh face. He pardoned me so gratefully that I felt warranted in thinking he might possibly care to know of the resemblance I had noted. He said, “Ah!” in the most amiable manner imaginable, “which part of America?” But just as I was going to tell him, the train drew into the station at Oxford, and he escaped out of the carriage.

Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the land comparatively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat, heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we approached Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, “universal politeness,” related mainly to the railway company’s servants, but there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten.

I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station, through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to supper.

Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and we were destined later to a pleasanter impression of Worcester than that from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern hotel, odorous only of a surrounding garden into which a soft rain was already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which embloom most English towns.

I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad, for instance,where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady-butler, and carved the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New England, as matron of a boys’ reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large imperial allowance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.

We were ourselves driving away in search of lodgings, which, whether you like them or not after you find them, it is always so interesting to look up in England. It was our fate commonly to visit places in their season when lodgings were scarce and dear; and it was one of the surprises that Great Malvern had in store for us that it was in the very height of its season. We should never have thought it, but for the assurance of the lodging-house landladies, who united in saying so, and in asking twice their fee as an earnest of good faith. The charming streets, which were not only laterally but vertically irregular, and curved and rose and fell in every direction, were so far from thronged that we were often the only people in them besides the unoccupied drivers of other flies than ours, and the boys who had pony chairs for hire, and demanded height-of-the-season prices for them. Perhaps the fellow-visitors whom we missed from the street were thronging in-doors: the hotels were full up; the boarding-houses could offer only a choice of inferior rooms; the lodgings had nearly all been taken at the rates which astonished if they did not

MALVERN—THE TOWN

dismay us. But we found the pleasantest apartment left at last, and were immediately as much domesticated in it as if we had lived there ever since it was built. In front it faced, across the street, a wooded and gardened steep; in the rear, from the window of our stately sitting-room, we looked out over a vast plain, of tilth and grass and groves, cheered everywhere with farm villages or farm cottages, and the grander edifices of the local nobility and gentry, and the spires of churches. Farther off where the Cotswold Hills began to be blue, glimmered Cheltenham, where we could, with a glass strong enough, have seen the retired military and civil employés of the India service who largely inhabit the place, basking in a summer heat of familiar tropical fervor, and a cheapness suited to their pensions. In the same quarter there was also sometimes visible a blur of dim towers and roofs which the guide-book knew as Tewkesbury; in the opposite direction, Worcester with its cathedral more boldly defined itself. The landscape seemed so altogether, so surpassingly English, that one day when I had nothing better to do—as was mostly the case with me in Malvern—I set down its amiable features, which I wish I could assemble here in a portrait. First, there were orchard and garden trees of our own house (one of a dozen houses on the same curving terrace), with apples, pears, and plums belted in by the larches and firs that deepened towards the foot of the hill. Pretty, well-kept dwellings of more or less state, showed their chimneys and slated or tiled roofs everywhere through the trees and shrubs at the beginning of what looked the level from our elevation. From these the plain stretched on, with hotels and churches salient from rows of red brick and gray stone cottages. Fields, now greening under the rains, but still keeping the warmercolors which the long drouth had given them, were parted into every angular form by rigid hedge-rows. They were fields of oats and grass, and sometimes wheat; but there were no recognizable orchards; and the trees that dotted the fields, singly and in clumps, massed themselves in forest effects in the increasing distance. They covered quite a third of the plain, which stretched twenty miles away on every hand, and were an accent of dark, harsh green amid the yellower tone of the meadows. The Cotswolds rising to the height of the Malvern Hills against the dull horizon (often rainy, now, but dull always), ended the immense level, where, coming or going, the little English railway trains, under their long white plumes of smoke, glided in every direction; and somewhere through the scene the unseen Severn ran.

Not to affront the reader’s intelligence, but to note my own ignorance, until an unusually excellent local guide-book partially dispersed it, will I remind him that all this region was once a royal chase. Half a dozen forests, of which Malvern Forest was chief, spread “a boundless contiguity of shade” over the hills and plains in which the cruel kings, from Canute down to Charles I., hunted the deer consecrated to their bows and spears, and took the lives or put out the eyes of any other man that slew them without leave. But in virtue of the unwritten law by which the people’s own reverts to them through the very pride of their expropriators, the dwellers in and about Malvern Chase had insensibly grown to have such rights and privileges in the wilderness that when Charles proposed to sell the woods they made a tumultuous protest; they rose in riot against the king’s will, and he had to give them two-thirds of the Chase for commons, before he could turn the remaining third into the money he needed so much.

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