noon.  This is one of the oldest cities, if not the oldest in the country.  Here one sees the England of his dreams, the England he so long desired to see, and which now presents to his gaze, as it were in a focus, both the monuments and the rubbish of many ages.  It was once a great military station of the Romans in Britain, who called it the City of Legions.  King AEthelfrith reduced it to ruins in the year 607, and it remained “a waste chester” (a waste castra or fortification) for three centuries.  The Danes made its walls a stronghold against Alfred and AEthelred, and the Lady of the Mercians, who was the daughter of Alfred and the wife of AEthelred, recognized the importance of the place, and built it up again.  It was the last city in England to hold out against William the Conqueror.  During the Civil Wars the city adhered to the royal cause, and was besieged and taken by the Parliamentary forces in 1645.  The Phoenix Tower bears the incription:  King Charles stood on this tower September 24, 1645, and saw his army defeated on Rowton Moor.

The Rows are a very curious feature of the two principal streets running at right angles to each other.  Besides the ordinary walks or pavements of these streets, there is a continuous covered gallery through the front of the second story.  Some one has said, “Great is the puzzle of the stranger as to whether the roadway is down in the cellar, or he is upstairs on the landing, or the house has turned outside of the window.”  On this “upstairs street,” as some call it, are situated all the first-class shops, the others being in the lower story on a level with the road.  Picture to yourself a row of houses having porches in the second story but not in the first, and you have a correct idea of the Rows of Chester.  To compare them to the Arcades of Rue de Rivoli in Paris, is a mistake, as they do not resemble those more, than a porch over a pavement resembles one in the second story.

The Cathedral is a grand old church.  It was built in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, upon the same site where two of its predecessors had already crumbled into decay. “St. John’s Church is even more ancient than the Cathedral, having been built in the eleventh century.  I shall never forget its weather-beaten walls and its mossy roof.  In many places, the thickness of the walls is greatly reduced by the rain and hail that have washed and beaten against it so long.  In my rambles through Chester I had the good fortune of meeting and forming the acquaintance of an Irish Catholic Priest and a wine merchant from Wolverhampton, two intelligent and amiable gentlemen, who taught me much about those curious relics still found in heaps among the ruins of old Chester.  At about 2:00 o’clock we stood upon the high square:  tower of St. John’s (thirty-five feet each side at the top) amidst the elderberries and grass which flourish at that giddy height.