The interior bears heavier marks of age than do the walls outside.  The chancel has walls built almost entirely of Roman brick, and the nave is without columns.  The old font—­certainly one of the first constructed in England—­stands in the chancel.  It was probably from this font that King Ethelbert was baptized.  Both chronicle and tradition say good Bertha was buried here.  A recess in the wall of the chancel contains an old stone coffin, which is believed to contain the dust of England’s first Christian queen.  Standing within this ancient structure, one feels that he has reached the source for Anglo-Saxon people of this modern faith, Christianity, and the civilization it has given to the world.  A new race of pilgrims, as numerous as those who went to Becket’s shrine, might well find as worthy an object of their gifts and their journeys in this ivy-mantled relic of ancient days.

Old York [Footnote:  From “Gray Days and Gold.”  By arrangement with the publishers, Moffat, Yard & Co.  Copyright by William Winter, 1890.]

BY WILLIAM WINTER

The pilgrim to York stands in the center of the largest shire in England, and is surrounded by castles and monasteries, now mostly in ruins, but teeming with those associations of history and literature that are the glory of this delightful land.  From the summit of the great central tower of the cathedral, which is reached by 237 steps, I gazed, one morning, over the vale of York and beheld one of the loveliest spectacles that ever blest the eyes of man.  The wind was fierce, the sun brilliant, and the vanquished storm-clouds were streaming away before the northern blast.  Far beneath lay the red-roofed city, its devious lanes and its many great churches,—­crumbling relics of ancient ecclesiastical power,—­distinctly visible.  Through the plain, and far away toward the south and east, ran the silver thread of the Ouse, while all around, as far as the eye could see, stretched forth a smiling landscape of green meadow and cultivated field; here a patch of woodland, and there a silver gleam of wave; here a manor house nestled amid stately trees, and there an ivy-covered fragment of ruined masonry; and everywhere the green lines of the flowering hedge....

In the city that lies at your feet stood once the potent Constantine, to be proclaimed Emperor, A.D. 306, and to be vested with the imperial purple of Rome.  In the original York Minster (the present is the fourth church that has been erected upon this site) was buried that valiant soldier, “old Siward,” whom “gracious England” lent to the Scottish cause, under Malcolm and Macduff, when time at length was ripe for the ruin of Glamis and Cawdor.  Close by is the field of Stamford, where Harold defeated the Norwegians with terrible slaughter, only nine days before he was himself defeated, and slain, at Hastings.  Southward, following the line of the Ouse, you look down upon the ruins of