last I am let out, and have the fresh air about me, it is as
though I were born again, and the sick fancies flee away from my mind
like swans in spring.

I want to come back on what I have said about eighteenth century and
middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to you the sort
of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one to my mind; the
spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of
magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bag-wigs, the clink of glasses
at night in fire-lit parlours, something certain and civic and domestic,
is all about these quiet, staid, shapely houses, with no character but
their exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they
make of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both
furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their
sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after
the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons
of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about
them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. O God be
praised that we live in this good daylight and this good peace.

_Barmouth, August 9th._--To-day we saw the cathedral at Chester; and,
far more delightful, saw and heard a certain inimitable verger who took
us round. He was full of a certain recondite, far-away humour that did
not quite make you laugh at the time, but was somehow laughable to
recollect. Moreover, he had so far a just imagination, and could put one
in the right humour for seeing an old place, very much as, according to
my favourite text, Scott's novels and poems do for one. His account of
the monks in the Scriptorium, with their cowls over their heads, in a
certain sheltered angle of the cloister where the big cathedral building
kept the sun off the parchments, was all that could be wished; and so
too was what he added of the others pacing solemnly behind them and
dropping, ever and again, on their knees before a little shrine there is
in the wall, "to keep 'em in the frame of mind." You will begin to think
me unduly biassed in this verger's favour if I go on to tell you his
opinion of me. We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear
the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to
them, with, I dare say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful
to me. "Ah," says he, "you're _very_ fond