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 river-meads—is like few schools in England, and none in any other country; and is proud of its singularity. It, too, has its stream of life, and on the whole a very gracious one, with its young, careless voices and high spirits. It lies, as I say, south of the Close; beyond the northward fringe of which you penetrate, under archway or by narrow entry, to the High Street, where another and different tide comes and goes, with mild hubbub of carts, carriages, motors—ladies shopping, magistrates and county councillors bent on business of the shire, farmers, traders, marketers.… This traffic, too, is all very English and ruddy and orderly.

Through it all, picturesque and respected, pass and repass the bedesmen of Saint Hospital: the Blanchminster Brethren in black gowns with a silver cross worn at the breast, the Beauchamp Brethren in gowns of claret colour with a silver rose. The terms of the twin bequests are not quite the same. To be a Collegian of Christ's Poor it is enough that you have attained the age of sixty-five, so reduced in strength as to be incapable of work; whereas you can become a Collegian of Noble Poverty at sixty, but with the proviso that misfortune has reduced you from independence (that is to say, from a moderate estate). The Beauchamp Brethren, who are the fewer, incline to give themselves airs over the Blanchminsters on the strength of this distinction: like Dogberry, in their time they have "had losses." But Merchester takes, perhaps, an equal pride in the pensioners of both orders.

Merchester takes an even fonder pride in St. Hospital itself—that compact and exquisite group of buildings, for the most part Norman, set in the water-meadows among the ambient streams of Mere. It lies a mile or so southward of the town, and some distance below the School, where the valley widens between the chalk-hills and, inland yet, you feel a premonition that the sea is not far away. All visitors to Merchester are directed towards St. Hospital, and they dote over it—the American visitors especially; because nowhere in England can one find the Middle Ages more compendiously summarised or more charmingly illustrated. Almost it might be a toy model of those times, with some of their quaintest customs kept going in smooth working order. But it is better. It is the real thing, genuinely surviving. No visitor ever finds disappointment in a pilgrimage to St. Hospital: the inmates take care of that.

The trustees, or governing body, are careful too. A few years ago, finding that his old lodgings in the quadrangle were too narrow for the Master's comfort, they erected a fine new house for him, just without the precincts. But though separated from the Hospital by a roadway, this new house comes into the picture from many points of view, and therefore not only did the architect receive instructions to harmonise it with the ancient buildings, but where he left off the trustees succeeded, planting wistarias, tall roses and selected ivies to run up the coigns and mullions. Nay, it is told that to encourage the growth of moss they washed over a portion of the walls (the servants' quarters) with a weak solution of farmyard manure. These conscientious pains have their reward, for to-day, at a little distance, the Master's house appears no less ancient than the rest of the mediaeval pile with which it composes so admirably.

With the Master himself we have made acquaintance. In the words of an American magazine, "the principal of this old-time foundation, Master E. J. Wriothesley (pronounced 'Wrottesley') Blanchminster, may be allowed to fill the bill. He is founder's kin, and just sweet."

The Master stepped forth from his rose-garlanded porch, crossed the road, and entered the modest archway which opens on the first, or outer, court. He walked habitually at a short trot, with his head and shoulders thrust a little forward and his hands clasped behind him. He never used a walking-stick.

The outer court of St. Hospital is plain and unpretending, with a brewhouse on one hand and on the other the large kitchen with its offices. Between these the good Master passed, and came to a second and handsomer gate, with a tower above it, and three canopied niches in the face of the tower, and in one of the niches—the others are empty—a kneeling figure of the great cardinal himself. The passageway through the tower is vaulted and richly groined, and in a little chamber beside it dwells the porter, a part of whose duty it is to distribute the Wayfarers' Dole—a horn of beer and a manchet of bread—to all who choose to ask for it. The Master halted a moment to give the porter good evening.

"And how many to-day, Brother Manby?"

"Thirty-three, Master, including a party of twelve that came in motor-cars. I was jealous the cast wouldn't go round, for they all insisted on having the dole, and a full slice, too—the gentlemen declaring they were hungry after their drive. But," added Brother Manby, with a glance at a card affixed by the archway and announcing that tickets to view the hospital could be procured at sixpence a head, "they were most appreciative, I must say."

The Master smiled, nodded, and passed on. He gathered that someone had profited by something over and above the twelve sixpences.

But how gracious, how serenely beautiful, how eloquent of peace and benediction, the scene that met him as he crossed the threshold of the great quadrangle! Some thousands of times his eyes had rested on it, yet how could it ever stale?

"In the evening there shall be light."—The sun, declining in a cloudless west behind the roof-ridge and tall chimneys of the Brethren's houses, cast a shadow even to the sundial that stood for centre of the wide grass-plot. All else was softest gold—gold veiling the sky itself in a powdery haze; gold spread full along the front of the 'Nunnery,' or row of upper chambers on the eastern line of the quadrangle, where the three nurses of St. Hospital have their lodgings; shafts of gold penetrating the shaded ambulatory below; gold edging the western coigns of the Norman chapel; gold rayed and slanting between boughs in the park beyond the railings to the south. Only the western side of the quadrangle lay in shadow, and in the shadow, in twos and threes, beside their doors and tiny flower-plots (their pride), sat the Brethren, with no anxieties, with no care but to watch the closing tranquil hour: some with their aged wives (for the Hospital, as the Church of England with her bishops, allows a Brother to have one wife, but ignores her existence), some in monastic groups, withdrawn from hearing of women's gossip.

The Master chose the path that, circumventing the grass-plot, led him past these happy-looking groups and couples. To be sure, it was not his nearest way to the