ears. For although the present
Abbey is but six centuries old, there are still remains to be seen of
an earlier building.

Morning service is just over. The choir boys have slipped off their
white surplices, and are setting the music books in order. The crowd of
sight-seers is beginning to wander about the Abbey. The monotonous
voices of the vergers are beginning their explanations of tomb and
chapel to the eager strangers. Let us get my good friends Mr. Berrington
or Mr. Deer who show the tombs, to come quietly with us in their black
gowns. Let us stand within the Sacrarium--the wide space inside the
altar rails. The splendid reredos glittering with gold, mosaic, and
jewels, blazes above the altar of carved cedar from Lebanon. Against the
stalls on the opposite side hangs the famous picture of King Richard the
Second. Beside us rise the gray stone canopies of the magnificent tombs
of Aymer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback--two of the finest specimens
of mediaeval art in England. The great groups of pillars round the choir
carry the eye upwards to the arcades of the Triforium, to the delicate
tracery of the great clerestory windows, to the wonderful misty roof.
But it is not overhead that I would have you look. Beneath your feet is
the mosaic pavement that Abbot Ware brought from Rome in 1267, when he
journeyed thither to be consecrated Abbot of Westminster by the Pope.
Our guide stoops down, touches a secret spring, and lifts up a square
block of the pavement. You look into a space some few feet deep. It is
almost filled with a mass of rudely chiselled stone--the base and part
of the shaft of a huge round pillar.

Look on that pillar with reverence. It has seen strange sights.

Under the arches it once supported, Edward the Confessor was buried.
Under them William the Norman was crowned king of England.

It was on the twenty-eighth of December, in the year of grace 1065, that
the Collegiate Church of St. Peter was consecrated. For fifteen years
Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king, who built it "to the honor of
God and St. Peter and all God's saints," had lavished time and money and
pious thought on the grandest building England had yet seen. It had
cost one tenth of the property of the kingdom. Its vast size, covering
as it did almost the same ground as the present Abbey, its great round
arches, its massive pillars, its deep foundations, its windows filled
with stained glass, its richly sculptured stones, its