bey, some parts of which had been roofed over and used as an inn. When we arrived, the rain was falling in torrents. Soon after supper we took our candles and climbed the winding stone stairs to our rooms in the tower. The stones were

uneven and worn by generations of pious feet. Outside we could see the ruined nave of the church, with all the surrounding buildings. We were in another age.

We

Had the sun shined next morning we should have gone on our gypsy journey, and Llanthony Abbey would have been only an incident. But for five days and five nights the rain descended. We could make valiant sallies, but were driven back for shelter. Shut in by "the tumultuous privacy of storm," one felt a sense of ownership. Only one book could be obtained, the "Life and Letters" of Walter Savage Landor. I had always I had always wanted to know more of Landor and here was the opportunity.

A little over a hundred years ago he came to the vale of Ewyas and bought this estate, and hither he brought his young bride. They occupied our rooms, it appeared. In 1809, Landor writes to Southey, "I am about to do what no man hath ever done in England, plant a wood of cedars of Lebanon. These trees will look magnificent on the mountains of Llanthony." He planted a million of them, so he said. How eloquently he growled over those trees! He prophesied that none of them would live.

After reading, I donned my raincoat and started out through the driving storm to see how Landor's trees were getting on. It seemed that it was only yesterday that they were planted. It was worth going out to see what had become of them. They were all gone. I felt that secret satisfaction which all rightminded persons feel on being witnesses to the fulfilment of prophecy.

And then there was the house which Landor started to build when he and his wife were living in our tower. "I hope," he writes, "before the close not of the next but of the succeeding summer, to

have one room to sit in with two or three bedrooms." Then he begins to growl' about the weather and the carpenters. After a while he writes again of the house: "It's not half finished and has cost me two thousand pounds. I think seriously of filling it with straw and setting fire to it. Never was anything half so ugly."

I inquired about the house and was told that it was not far away on the hillside, and was yet unfinished. I was pleased with this, and meant to go up and see it when the spell of bad weather of which Landor complained had passed by.

Beside Landor there was only one other historic association which one could enjoy without getting drenched-that was St. David. In wading across the barnyard, I encountered "Boots," an intelligent young man though unduly respectful. He informed me that the old building just across from the stable was the cell of St. David.

I was not prepared for this. All I knew was that St. David was the patron saint of Wales and had a cathedral and a number of other churches dedicated to him. Without too grossly admitting my ignorance, I tried to draw out from my mentor some further biographical facts that my imagination might work on during my stay. He thought that St. David was some relation to King Arthur, but just what the relation was, and whether he was only a relative by marriage, he didn't know. It wasn't very much information, but I was profoundly grateful to him.

I have since read a long article on St. David in the "Cambrian Plutarch." The author goes into the question of the family relations between King Arthur and St. David with great thoroughness, but what conclusion he comes to is not quite evident. He thinks that the people are wrong who say that St. David was a nephew, because he was fifty years older than Arthur. That would make him more likely his uncle. But as he admits that King Arthur may possibly be an

other name for the constellation Ursa Major, it is difficult to fix the dates exactly. At any rate, the "Cambrian Plutarch" is sure that King Arthur was a Welshman and a credit to the countryand so was St. David. The author was as accurate in regard to the dates as the nature of his subject would allow. He adds apologetically, "It will appear that the life of St. David is rather misplaced with respect to chronological order. But as he was contemporary with all those whose lives have already been given, the anachronism, if such it may be called, can be of no great importance."

That is just the way I feel about it. After living for a whole week in such close contact with the residence of St. David, I feel a real interest in him. Just who he was and when he lived, if at all, is a matter of no great importance.

Yet there are limits to the historical imagination. It must have something to work on, even though that something may be very vague. We must draw the line somewhere in our pursuit of antiquity. A relic may be too old to be effective. Instead of gently stimulating the imagination it may paralyze it. What we desire is not merely the ancient but the familiar. The relic must bring with it the sense of auld lang-syne. The Tory squire likes to preserve what has been a long time in his family. The traveler has the same feeling for the possessions of the family of humanity.

The family-feeling does not go back of a certain point. I draw the line at the legendary period when the heroes have names, and more or less coherent stories are told of their exploits. People who had a local habitation, but not a name, seem to belong to Geology only. For all their flint arrow-heads, or bronze instruments, I cannot think of them as fellow men.

It was with this feeling that I visited one of the most ancient places of worship in Ireland, the tumulus at Newgrange. It was on a day filled with historic sightseeing. We started from Drogheda, the

great stronghold of the Pale in the Middle Ages, and the scene of Cromwell's terrible vengeance in 1649. Three miles up the river is the site of the Battle of the Boyne. It was one of the great indecisive battles of the world, it being necessary to fight it over again every year. The Boyne had overflowed its banks, and in the fields forlorn hay-cocks stood like so many little islands. We stopped at the battle monument and read its Whiggish inscription, which was scorned by our honest driver. We could form some idea of how the field appeared on the eventful day when King William and King James confronted each other across the narrow stream. Then the scene changed and we found ourselves in Mellefont Abbey, the first Cistercian monastery in Ireland, founded by St. Malachy, the friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. King William and King James were at once relegated to their proper places among the moderns, while we went back to the ages of faith.

Four miles farther we came to Monasterboice, where stood two great Celtic crosses. There are two ruined churches and a round tower. Here was an early religious establishment which existed before the times of St. Columba.

This would be enough for one day's reminiscence, but my heart leaped up at the sight of a long green ridge. "There is the hill of Tara!"

Having traversed the period from King William to the dwellers in the Halls of Tara, what more natural than to take a further plunge into the past?

We drive into an open field and alight near a rock-strewn hill. Candles are given us and we grope our way through narrow passages till we come to the centre of the hill. Here is a chamber some twenty feet in height. On the great stones which support the roof are mystic emblems. On the floor is a large stone hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. It suggests human sacrifices. My guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence

for it. But it seemed to me that if these people ever practised such sacrifices this was the place for them. A gloomier chamber for weird rites could not be imagined.

Druids

Who were the worshipers? Druids or pre-Druids? The archæologists tell us that they belonged to the Early Bronze period. Now Early Bronze is a good enough term for articles in a museum, but it does not suggest a human being. We cannot get on terms of spiritual intimacy with the Early Bronze people. We may know what they did, but there is no intimation of "the moving why they did it." What spurred them on to their feats of prodigious industry? Was it fear or love? First they built their chapel of great stones and then piled a huge hill on top of it. Were they still under the influence of the glacial period and attempting to imitate the wild doings of nature? The passage of the ages does not make these men seem venerable, because their deeds are no longer intelligible. Mellefont Abbey is in ruins, but we can easily restore it in imagination. We can picture the great buildings as they were before the iconoclasts destroyed them. The prehistoric place of worship in the middle of the hill is practically unchanged. But the clue to its meaning is lost.

I could not make the ancient builders and worshipers seem real. It was a relief to come up into the sunshine where

people of our own kind had walked, the Kings of Tara and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St. Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III. After the unintelligible symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on the Celtic crosses. They were mostly about people, and people whom we had known from earliest childhood. There were Adam and Eve, and Cain slaying Abel, and the Magi. They were members of our family.

But between us and the builders of the underground chapel there was a great gulf. There was no means of spiritual communication across the abyss. A scrap of writing, a bit of poetry, a name handed down by tradition, would have been worth all the relics discovered by archæologists.

There is justification for the traveler's preference for the things he has read about, for these are the things which resist the changes of time. Only he must remember that they are better preserved in the book than in the places where they happened. The impression which any generation makes on the surface of the earth is very slight. It cannot give the true story of the brief occupancy. That requires some more direct interpretation.

The magic carpet which carries us into any age not our own is woven by the poets and historians. Without their aid we may travel through Space, but not through Time.

sir," he said. At home such a boy might have said to the others: "G'wan, these're fer me." Again, when I inquired my way of a tiny, ragged mite, he directed me to "go as straight as ever you can go, sir, across the cricket field; then take your first right; go straight through the copse, sir," he called after me. The copse? Perhaps I was thinking of the "cops" of New York. Then I understood that the urchin was speaking of a small wood.

Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, with the rising and falling inflection of the lower classes. "Top of the street, bottom of the road, over the way"-so it goes. And, by the way, how does an Englishman know which is the top and which is the bottom of every street?

Naturally, the English caun't understand us. "When is it that you are going 'ome?" asked my friend, the policeman in King's Road.

"Oh, some time in the fall," I told him. "In the fall?" he inquired, puzzled. "Yes, September or October."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "in the autumn, yes, yes. At the fall of the leaves," I heard him murmur meditatively. Meeting him later in the company of another policeman, "He," he said to his friend, nodding at me, "is going back in the fall." Deliciously humorous to him was my speech. Now it may be mentioned as an interesting point that many of the words imported in the Mayflower, or in ships following it, have been quite forgotten in England. Fall, as in the fall of the year, I think, was among them. Quite so, quite so, as they say in England.

Yes, in the King's Road. For, it is an odd thing, Charles Scribner's Sons are on Fifth Avenue, but Selfridge's is in Oxford Street. Here we meet a man on the street; we kick him into it. And in England it is a very different thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the street or on the street. You, for instance, wouldn't meet a lady on the street at all. In fact, in England, to our mind, things are so turned around that it is as good as

being in China. Just as traffic there keeps to the left kerb, instead of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you up on the telephone, there you phone me down. It would be awkward, wouldn't it, for me to say to you that I called you down?

England is an island; and though the British Government controls one fifth, or something like that, of the habitable globe, England is a very small place. Most of the things there are small. A freight car is a goods van, and it certainly is a goods van and not a freight car. So when you ask what little stream this is, you are told that that is the river Lea, or the river Arun, as the case may be, although they look, indeed, except that they are far more lovely, like what we call "cricks" in our country. And the Englishman is fond of speaking in diminutives. He calls for a "drop of ale," to receive a pint tankard. He asks for a "bite of bread," when he wants half a loaf. His "bit of green" is a bowl of cabbage. He likes a "bit of cheese," in the way of a hearty slice, now and then. One overhearing him from another room might think that his copious repast was a microscopic meal. About this peculiarity in the homely use of the language there was a joke in Punch not long ago. Said the village worthy in the picture: "Ah, I used to be as fond of a drop o' beer as any one, but nowadays if I do take two or dree gallons it do knock I over!"

Into the matter of the quaint features of the speech of the English countryside, or the wonders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned foreigner hardly dare venture. It is sufficient for us to wonder why a railroad should be a railway. When it becomes a "rilewie" we are inclined, in our speculation, "to pass," as we say over here. And ale, when it is "ile," brings to mind a pleasant story. A humble Londoner, speaking of an oil painting of an island, referred to it as “a painting in ile of an oil."

An American friend of mine, resident in London, insists that where there is an English word for a thing other than the