part of the same
picture, of that first day in Galloway.

I know we skimmed through a little place called Cummer-trees, and then
Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the "sights of the
world." He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even
Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to
have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.

We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross
which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and
diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a
history as intricate as its own strange carvings.

In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a
high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to
the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We
must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing
beforehand.

The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long
before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against
the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation,
and nobody knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic
inscriptions meant. Nobody cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a
General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and
broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise
person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another
person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed
until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his
manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies
of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about
them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the
eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for
a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he
discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest
of all, the rudiments of the language which--as Sir S. expressed
it--"Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected"; because they had
to _make_ their words, as well as group them together--which is all that
lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life
of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate;
but it was the runic inscriptions wh