not have it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look
in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend
and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent
resting-place."

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot
divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as
idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world. After
all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so
infinitely sweet to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where I had not
been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to have a Sunday service
at the cathedral of beautiful memories, I went on a Saturday to Shepton
Mallet. A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book
calls it. Well, yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings together, the
church and a dozen or twenty public-houses included. To get some food I
went to the only eating-house in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking
woman, plump and high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of
good humour and goodness of every description in her comely countenance.
She promised to have a chop ready by the time I had finished looking at
the church, and I said I would have it with a small Guinness. She could
not provide that, the house, she said, was strictly temperance. "My
doctor has ordered me to take it," said I, "and if you are religious,
remember that St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a heightened
colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name, "but we go on a
different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses, called
hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel,
or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they
called a beefsteak pie--a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes
carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious
fare and a glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came