I have seldom seen a place more quaint, pretty, calm, and pastoral, than this remote little Chur.  What need have the inhabitants for walls and ramparts, except to build summer-houses, to trail vines, and hang clothes to dry on them?  No enemies approach the great mouldering gates:  only at morn and even the cows come lowing past them, the village maidens chatter merrily round the fountains, and babble like the ever-voluble stream that flows under the old walls.  The schoolboys, with book and satchel, in smart uniforms, march up to the gymnasium, and return thence at their stated time.  There is one coffee-house in the town, and I see one old gentleman goes to it.  There are shops with no customers seemingly, and the lazy tradesmen look out of their little windows at the single stranger sauntering by.  There is a stall with baskets of queer little black grapes and apples, and a pretty brisk trade with half a dozen urchins standing round.  But, beyond this, there is scarce any talk or movement in the street.  There’s nobody at the book-shop.  “If you will have the goodness to come again in an hour,” says the banker, with his mouthful of dinner at one o’clock, “you can have the money.”  There is nobody at the hotel, save the good landlady, the kind waiters, the brisk young cook who ministers to you.  Nobody is in the Protestant church—­(oh! strange sight, the two confessions are here at peace!)—­nobody in the Catholic church:  until the sacristan, from his snug abode in the cathedral close, espies the traveller eying the monsters and pillars before the old shark-toothed arch of his cathedral, and comes out (with a view to remuneration possibly) and opens the gate, and shows you the venerable church, and the queer old relics in the sacristy, and the ancient vestments (a black velvet cope, amongst other robes, as fresh as yesterday, and presented by that notorious “pervert,” Henry of Navarre and France), and the statue of St. Lucius who built St. Peter’s Church, on Cornhill.

What a quiet, kind, quaint, pleasant, pretty old town!  Has it been asleep these hundreds and hundreds of years, and is the brisk young Prince of the Sidereal Realms in his screaming car drawn by his snorting steel elephant coming to waken it?  Time was when there must have been life and bustle and commerce here.  Those vast, venerable walls were not made to keep out cows, but men-at-arms, led by fierce captains, who prowled about the gates, and robbed the traders as they passed in and out with their bales, their goods, their pack-horses, and their wains.  Is the place so dead that even the clergy of the different denominations can’t quarrel?  Why, seven or eight, or a dozen, or fifteen hundred years ago (they haven’t the register at St. Peter’s up to that remote period.  I dare say it was burnt in the fire of London)—­a dozen hundred years ago, when there was some life in the town, St. Lucius was stoned here on account of theological differences, after founding our church in Cornhill.