[Illustration:  YORK MINSTER.]

From Marston Moor we continued along the valley of the River Ouse until we arrived at the city of York, which Cromwell entered a fortnight after the battle; but we did not meet with any resistance as we passed through one of its ancient gateways, or “bars.”  We were very much impressed with the immense size and grandeur of the great Minster, with its three towers rising over two hundred feet in height.  We were too late to see the whole of the interior of this splendid old building, but gazed with a feeling of wonder and awe on one of the largest stained-glass windows in the world, about seventy feet high, and probably also the oldest, as it dated back about five hundred years.  The different scenes depicted in the beautiful colours of the ancient glass panels represented every important Biblical event from the Creation downwards.  We were surprised to find the window so perfect, as the stained-glass windows we had seen elsewhere had been badly damaged.  But the verger explained that when the Minster was surrendered to the army of the Commonwealth in the Civil War, it was on condition that the interior should not be damaged nor any of the stained glass broken.  We could not explore the city further that afternoon, as the weather again became very bad, so we retreated to our inn, and as our sorely-tried shoes required soling and heeling, we arranged with the “boots” of the inn to induce a shoemaker friend of his in the city to work at them during the night and return them thoroughly repaired to the hotel by six o’clock the following morning.  During the interval we wrote our letters and read some history, but our room was soon invaded by customers of the inn, who were brought in one by one to see the strange characters who had walked all the way from John o’ Groat’s and were on their way to the Land’s End, so much so that we began to wonder if it would end in our being exhibited in some show in the ancient market-place, which we had already seen and greatly admired, approached as it was then by so many narrow streets and avenues lined with overhanging houses of great antiquity.  We were, however, very pleased with the interest shown both in ourselves and the object of our walk, and one elderly gentleman seemed inclined to claim some sort of relationship with us, on the strength of his having a daughter who was a schoolmistress at Rainford village, in Lancashire.  He was quite a jovial old man, and typical of “a real old English gentleman, one of the olden time.”  He told us he was a Wesleyan local preacher, but had developed a weakness for “a pipe of tobacco and a good glass of ale.”  He said that when Dick Turpin rode from London to York, his famous horse, “Black Bess,” fell down dead when within sight of the towers of the Minster, but the exact spot he had not been able to ascertain, as the towers could be seen from so long a distance.  York, he said, was an older city than London, the See of York being even older than that of Canterbury, and a Lord Mayor existed at York long before there was one in London.  He described the grand old Minster as one of the “Wonders of the World.”  He was very intelligent, and we enjoyed his company immensely.