the grass at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of the great stumps of the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange it is that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and elaborate a work of art should have arisen.  It is but an hour’s walk to another great ruin, which has held together more completely.  There the central tower stands erect to half its altitude, and the round arches and massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf.  You get an impression that when Catholic England was in her prime great abbeys were as thick as milestones.  By native amateurs, even now, the region is called “wild,” though to American eyes it seems thoroughly suburban in its smoothness and finish.  There is a noiseless little railway running through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the abbey gates—­a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly brick houses, with a dozen “publics,” with tidy, whitewashed cottages, and with little girls, as I have said, bobbing courtesies in the street.  But even now, if one had wound one’s way into the valley by the railroad, it would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a spot on the whole so natural and pastoral.  How impressive then must the beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness sensible!  The abbey was in those days a great affair:  as my companion said, it sprawled all over the place.  As you walk away from it you think you have got to the end of its traces, but you encounter them still in the shape of a rugged outhouse grand with an Early-English arch, or an ancient well hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern.  It is noticeable that even if you are a traveller from a land where there are no Early-English—­and indeed few Late-English—­arches, and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest, of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this antiquity.  Anything very old seems extremely natural:  there is nothing we accept so implicitly as the past.  It is not too much to say that after spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years.  You seem yourself to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak with your touch.  You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks used to pace, looking out of the Gothic window-places at their beautiful church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to what is now the drawing-room.  The massive step by which you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be:  the lintels are cracked and worn by the myriad-fingered years.  This strikes your casual glance.  You look up and down the miniature cloister before you pass in:  it seems wonderfully old and queer.  Then you turn into