it all there, enclosed and casketed--"a box where sweets
compacted lie."

Let him arrive on a Saturday night and awake next morning to the note
of the Cathedral bell, and hear the bugles answering from the
barracks up the hill beyond the mediaeval gateway. As he sits down
to breakfast the bugles will start sounding nigher, with music absurd
and barbarous, but stirring, as the Riflemen come marching down the
High Street to Divine Service. In the Minster to which they wend,
their disused regimental colours droop along the aisles; tattered, a
hundred years since, in Spanish battlefields, and by age worn almost
to gauze--"strainers," says Brother Copas, "that in their time have
clarified much turbid blood." But these are guerdons of yesterday in
comparison with other relics the Minster guards. There is royal dust
among them--Saxon and Dane and Norman--housed in painted chests above
the choir stalls. "_Quare fremuerunt gentes?_" intone the
choristers' voices below, Mr. Simeon's weak but accurate tenor among
them. "_The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel
together_ . . ." The Riflemen march down to listen. As they go by
ta-ra-ing, the douce citizens of Merchester and their wives and
daughters admire from the windows discreetly; but will attend _their_
Divine Service later. This, again, is England.

Sundays and week-days at intervals the Cathedral organ throbs across
the Close, gently shaking the windows of the Deanery and the Canons'
houses, and interrupting the chatter of sparrows in their ivy.
Twice or thrice annually a less levitical noise invades, when our
State visits its Church; in other words, when with trumpeters and
javelin-men the High Sheriff escorts his Majesty's Judges to hear the
Assize Sermon. On these occasions the head boy of the great School,
which lies a little to the south of the Cathedral, by custom presents
a paper to the learned judge, suing for a school holiday; and his
lordship, brushing up his Latinity, makes a point of acceding in the
best hexameters he can contrive. At his time of life it comes easier
to try prisoners; and if he lie awake, he is haunted less by his day
in Court than by the fear of a false quantity.

The School--with its fourteenth-century quadrangles, fenced citywards
behind a blank brewhouse-wall (as though its Founder's first
precaution had been to protect learning from siege), and its
precincts opening rearwards upon green playing-fields and
r