for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the new
spire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channel
past Bisham upon a rising tide. And as he passed beneath it (for, of
the many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he would
have seen a great and populous place with nothing ruinous in it, all
well ordered, busy with men and splendid; here again that which we now
look upon as a relic and a circumstance of repose was once alive and
strong.

Upon his way beneath the old stone bridge which crossed the ford, and
shooting between the lifted paddles of the weirs, he would, once below
Oxford, have seen much the same pastures that we see to-day; but in a
few hours Abingdon, the next to Osney, would have fixed his eyes as
Osney had before.

Abingdon would have been to him what Noyon is on the Oise, or any of
our river cathedrals in Western Europe--an apse pointing up stream,
though rounded and lacking the flying buttresses of the Gothic, for it
was thick, broad, and Norman. Here also, as one may believe, from its
situation, trees would have shrouded somewhat what he saw. There are
few such riverside apses in Christian Europe that are not screened in
this manner by trees planted between the stream and them. But as he
drifted farther down, before he reached the bridge, the west front
would have burst upon him, quite new, exceedingly rich and proud, a
strict example, one may believe, of the Perpendicular, and of what was
for the first time, and for a moment only, a true English Gothic. It
would have stood out before him, catching the sun of the afternoon in
its maze of glass. It would have seemed a thing to endure; within his
lifetime it was to be utterly destroyed.

Once more in the many reaches between Abingdon and Wallingford, the
sights would have been those which a man sees now. And though at
Wallingford he would have had before him a town of brilliant red tiles
and timberwork, and a town perhaps larger than that which we see
to-day, yet (could such a man come to life again) the contrast would
not strike him here, and still less in the fields below, so much as
when he came near to Reading.

That everything else of age in Reading has disappeared one need not
say, but were that traveller here to-day, the thing that he would most
seek for and most lack would be the bulk of the building at the
farther end of the town.

One can best say what it was by saying that it was like Durham. It is
true that