At Chester we had the blissful security of being unknown, and were left to ourselves.  Americans know Chester better than most other old towns in England, because they so frequently stop there awhile on their way from Liverpool to London.  It has a mouldy old cathedral, an old wall, partly Roman, strange old houses with overhanging upper floors, which make sheltered sidewalks and dark basements.  When one sees an old house in New England with the second floor projecting a foot or two beyond the wall of the ground floor, the country boy will tell him that “them haouses was built so th’t th’ folks upstairs could shoot the Injins when they was tryin’ to git threew th’ door or int’ th’ winder.”  There are plenty of such houses all over England, where there are no “Injins” to shoot.  But the story adds interest to the somewhat lean traditions of our rather dreary past, and it is hardly worth while to disturb it.  I always heard it in my boyhood.  Perhaps it is true; certainly it was a very convenient arrangement for discouraging an untimely visit.  The oval lookouts in porches, common in our Essex County, have been said to answer a similar purpose, that of warning against the intrusion of undesirable visitors.  The walk round the old wall of Chester is wonderfully interesting and beautiful.  At one part it overlooks a wide level field, over which the annual races are run.  I noticed that here as elsewhere the short grass was starred with daisies.  They are not considered in place in a well-kept lawn.  But remembering the cuckoo song in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “When daisies pied ... do paint the meadows with delight,” it was hard to look at them as unwelcome intruders.

The old cathedral seemed to me particularly mouldy, and in fact too high-flavored with antiquity.  I could not help comparing some of the ancient cathedrals and abbey churches to so many old cheeses.  They have a tough gray rind and a rich interior, which find food and lodging for numerous tenants who live and die under their shelter or their shadow,—­lowly servitors some of them, portly dignitaries others, humble holy ministers of religion many, I doubt not,—­larvae of angels, who will get their wings by and by.  It is a shame to carry the comparison so far, but it is natural enough; for Cheshire cheeses are among the first things we think of as we enter that section of the country, and this venerable cathedral is the first that greets the eyes of great numbers of Americans.

We drove out to Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster, the many-millioned lord of a good part of London.  It is a palace, high-roofed, marble-columned, vast, magnificent, everything but homelike, and perhaps homelike to persons born and bred in such edifices.  A painter like Paul Veronese finds a palace like this not too grand for his banqueting scenes.  But to those who live, as most of us do, in houses of moderate dimensions, snug, comfortable, which the owner’s presence fills sufficiently, leaving