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AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL

VEN the local guide-book, which is necessarily optimistic, owns that the railroad service between Bath and Wells leaves something to be desired. The distance is twenty miles, and you can make it by the Great Western in something over two hours, but if you are pressed for time, the Somerset and Dorset line will carry you in two. As we were nationally in a hurry, though personally we had time to spare, we went and came by this line, mostly in a sort of vague rain, which favored the blossoming of the primroses along the railroad bank. Not that any part of the way needed rain; great stretches of the country lay soaking in the rainfall of the year before, which had not had sun enough to diminish its depth or breadth. In fact, on the eve of the sunniest and loveliest summer which perhaps England ever saw, the whole West looked in March as if wringing it out and hanging it up to dry in a steamlaundry could alone get the wet out of it. The water lay in wide expanses in the meadows, the plethoric streams swam chokeful; in the ditches men were at work with short scythes cutting the rank weeds out to give the flood a little course, but where it was to run was a question which did not answer itself.

We were in a third-class compartment, and we had the advantage of the simple life getting in and out of a

train that seemed to stop oftener than it started. Our ever-changing fellow-passengers were mostly mothers of large little families: babies in arms, and babies slightly bigger, sisters and brothers pendent at arm's - length from the mother-hands, all with flaring blue eyes and flaming red cheeks, and flaxen hair and mild, sweet faces. Everybody was good, and helped these helpless families to mount and dismount; the kindly porters came and went with their impracticable bundles, and the passengers handed the brothers and sisters after the baby-burdened mother, or took them from her so that she might stumble into the carriage without falling upon her detached offspring. They were beautifully polite in word and deed, so that it was a consolation to hear and see them.

Shortly after our journey began, our train was apparently run down by an old man and his granddaughter who got in blown and panting from their chase of half a mile before overtaking us. They were of the thin blond type of some English country folks, with a milder color in their cheeks than usual, and between his age and her youth they had about a third of the natural allowance of teeth. Agriculture is apparently nowhere favorable to the preservation of teeth; the rustic theory is that when a tooth offends one should pluck it out; but in England they never expect to replace it, while with us they pluck out all the others and replace them with new ones from the dentist's, so that when you see good teeth in a country mouth you know where they come from. Their want of teeth did not prevent the old man and the little girl from beginning to eat as soon as they could get their breath. They were going on a visit to her aunt, it seemed, and she was provisioned against the chances of famine in the hour's journey by

a plentiful supply of oranges and apples and cakes in a net bag. "Us 'ad a 'ard chase, didn't us?" the old man asked her, with a sociable glance round the place. The little girl nodded with her mouth full, while her fingers explored the bag for more cakes to fill it when it should be empty, and the old man leaned tenderly towards her and suggested, "Couldn't your little 'and find something for me, too?" She drew forth an orange and a cake and gave them to him. Then they munched on, he garrulously, she silently; with what teeth they had between them they must have managed to masticate their food, and there is every probability that they reached their journey's end without famishing.

We had only two changes to make in our twenty miles, and as we were on the swift train that made the distance in two hours, we did not mind some delay at each change. It was just lunch-time when we reached Wells, and had ourselves driven in the hotel omnibus, a tremendously rackety vehicle, to The Swan. This bird's plumage was much disarranged by some sort of Easter preparations, and there were workmen taking down and hanging up decorations. But there was quiet in the coffee-room, where over a cold, cold, luncheon we shivered in sympathy with the icy gloom of the basement entrance of the inn, where an office-lady darkled behind her office-window, apparently in winter-long question whether she would be warmer with it shut or open. It was an inn of the old type, now happily obsolescent, which if it cannot smell directly of a stable-yard, does what it can by smelling of the stable-boy in its doorway. We had not, however, come to Wells for the Swan, but for the cathedral, and as we could look out at its loveliness from the window where we ate lunch, we had really nothing to complain of. We had indeed something

specially to be glad of, for we could there get our first glimpse of the cathedral through the Dean's Eye, or if this is not quite honest, from over the Dean's Eyebrow, so to call the top of the fifteenth-century gate, which commands the finest approach to the cathedral. When you have passed through the Dean's Eye it may not be quite as if you had passed through the Needle's Eye; but if I had been an American millionaire who had my doubts of the way I was going I might have fancied myself achieving a feat even more difficult than the camel's, and to be entering the Kingdom as I crossed the lawn inside the gate, and moved in my rapture towards the divine edifice. All the English cathedrals are beautiful, but among those which are most beautiful the Wells cathedral is next to the cathedral of Ely, in my memory. I am not speaking of stateliness or grandeur, but of that more refined and exquisite something which makes a supreme appeal in, say, the Church of St. Mark's at Venice. I came away from the Wells cathedral saying to myself that there was a loveliness in it for which there was no word but feminine; and if this conveys any notion to the reader's mind, I shall be glad to leave him for the rest to any pictures of it he can find.

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Of course we followed the verger through it in the usual way, but I could not make any one follow me with as much profit. It had its quaint details, and its grotesque details, from the bursting fun of the ages of faith, as well as its expressions of simple reverence, all blending to the sort of tender beauty I have tried to intimate, and it had its great wonder of an inverted arch, through which one looked at its glories as with one's head held upside down. I do not know but the 1325 clock of Peter Lightfoot, monk of Glastonbury, is as great a wonder as the inverted arch.

We were so fortunate as to be present when it struck the hour, and so we saw the four knights on horseback go riding round, and the seated man kick two small bells with his heels, as he has been doing every fifteen minutes for nigh six hundred years. For the ordinary lay-mind on its travels, I suppose, this active personage is one of the great attractions of the cathedral next after the toothache-man in one of the capitals who pulls his mouth open to show his aching tooth. He has been much photographed, of course, but he is to be seen in situ just above that bishop's tomb which is sovereign, through the bishop's merits, for the toothache. The verger, who told us this, left us to suppose that the tomb had been too difficult of application to the tooth of the sufferer above, and that this was why he was still appealing to the public sympathy.

We offered him a mute condolence after we had sated ourselves with the beauty of the most beautiful chapter-house in the world, ascending and descending by the wide, foot-worn, curving sweep of the unique stairway, and then walking through into the Vicar's Close, and the two rows of Singers' Houses, like cottages in a particularly successful stage perspective. As we passed one of these histrionic habitations, each with its lifelike dooryard and its practicable gate, three of the clerical students, who have an immemorial right to lodge with the singers, came out gayly challenging one another which way they should walk, and deciding on Tor Hill, wherever that was, and then starting off at a good round pace in the rain. The doubting day had sorrowed and soured to that effect, and when the verger had led us through the cloister aisle into the gardens of the bishop's palace the grounds were so much like waters that there seemed no reason why the ducks should not