And her glory has never departed from her and never will so long as her great cathedral stands intact, guarding its age-long line of proud traditions.  The exterior is not altogether pleasing—­the length exceeding that of any cathedral in Europe, together with the abbreviated tower, impresses one with a painful sense of lack of completeness and a failure of proper proportion.  It has not the splendid site of Durham or Lincoln, the majesty of the massive tower of Canterbury, or the grace of the great spire of Salisbury.  But its interior makes full amends.  No cathedral in all England can approach it in elaborate carvings and furnishings or in interesting relics and memorials.  Here lie the bones of the Saxon King Ethelwulf, father of Alfred the Great; of Canute, whose sturdy common sense silenced his flatterers; and of many others.  A scion of the usurping Norman sleeps here too, in the tomb where William Rufus was buried, “with many looking on and few grieving.”  In the north aisle a memorial stone covers the grave of Jane Austen and a great window to her memory sends its many-colored shafts of light from above.  In the south transept rests Ike Walton, prince of fishermen, who, it would seem to us, must have slept more peacefully by some rippling brook.  During the Parliamentary wars Winchester was a storm center and the cathedral suffered severely at the hands of the Parliamentarians.  Yet fortunately, many of its ancient monuments and furnishings escaped the wrath of the Roundhead iconoclasts.  The cathedral is one of the oldest in England, having been mainly built in the Ninth Century.  Recently it has been discovered that the foundations are giving away to an extent that makes extensive restoration necessary, but it will be only restored and not altered in any way.

But we may not pause long to tell the story of even Winchester Cathedral in this hasty record of a motor flight through Britain.  And, speaking of the motor car, ardent devotee as I am, I could not help feeling a painful sense of the inappropriateness of its presence in Winchester; of its rush through the streets at all hours of the night; of its clatter as it climbed the steep hills in the town; of the blast of its unmusical horn; and of its glaring lights, falling weirdly on the old buildings.  It seemed an intruder in the capital of King Alfred.

There is much else in Winchester, though the cathedral and its associations may overshadow everything.  The college, one of the earliest educational institutions in the Kingdom, was founded about 1300, and many of the original buildings stand almost unchanged.  The abbey has vanished, though the grounds still serve as a public garden; and of Wolvesley Palace, a castle built in 1138, only the keep still stands.  How usual this saying, “Only the keep still stands,” becomes of English castles,—­thanks to the old builders who made the keep strong and high to withstand time, and so difficult to tear down that it escaped the looters of the ages.