rch that was built more than six hundred
years ago; it is now two hundred years since that church vanished from
the face of the earth; it was destroyed utterly,--no fragment of it was
left; not even the great pillars that bore up the tower at the cross,
where the choir used to join the nave. No one knows now even where it
stood, only in this very autumn-tide, if you knew the place, you would
see the heaps made by the earth-covered ruins heaving the yellow corn
into glorious waves, so that the place where my church used to be is as
beautiful now as when it stood in all its splendour. I do not remember
very much about the land where my church was; I have quite forgotten the
name of it, but I know it was very beautiful, and even now, while I am
thinking of it, comes a flood of old memories, and I almost seem to see
it again,--that old beautiful land! only dimly do I see it in spring and
summer and winter, but I see it in autumn-tide clearly now; yes, clearer,
clearer, oh! so bright and glorious! yet it was beautiful too in spring,
when the brown earth began to grow green: beautiful in summer, when the
blue sky looked so much bluer, if you could hem a piece of it in between
the new white carving; beautiful in the solemn starry nights, so solemn
that it almost reached agony--the awe and joy one had in their great
beauty. But of all these beautiful times, I remember the whole only of
autumn-tide; the others come in bits to me; I can think only of parts of
them, but all of autumn; and of all days and nights in autumn, I remember
one more particularly. That autumn day the church was nearly finished
and the monks, for whom we were building the church, and the people, who
lived in the town hard by, crowded round us oftentimes to watch us
carving.

Now the great Church, and the buildings of the Abbey where the monks
lived, were about three miles from the town, and the town stood on a hill
overlooking the rich autumn country: it was girt about with great walls
that had overhanging battlements, and towers at certain places all along
the walls, and often we could see from the churchyard or the Abbey
garden, the flash of helmets and spears, and the dim shadowy waving of
banners, as the knights and lords and men-at-arms passed to and fro along
the battlements; and we could see too in the town the three spires of the
three churches; and the spire of the Cathedral, which was the tallest of
the three, was gilt all over with gold, and a