s altitude, and the round arches and
massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf.
You get an impression that when Catholic England was in her prime great
abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the
region is called "wild," though to American eyes it seems thoroughly
suburban in its smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway
running through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
abbey gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly
brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed cottages, and
with little girls, as I have said, bobbing courtesies in the street. But
even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the railroad, it
would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a spot
on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive then must the
beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim
came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness
sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair: as my companion said,
it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away from it you think you have
got to the end of its traces, but you encounter them still in the shape of
a rugged outhouse grand with an Early-English arch, or an ancient well
hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. It is noticeable that even if you
are a traveller from a land where there are no Early-English--and indeed
few Late-English--arches, and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest,
of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this
antiquity. Anything very old seems extremely natural: there is nothing we
accept so implicitly as the past. It is not too much to say that after
spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you
seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You seem yourself
to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak
with your touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks
used to pace, looking out of the Gothic window-places at their beautiful
church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to
what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by which you ascend to the
threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be: the lintels are cracked and
worn by the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual glance. You
look up and