His appearance when I approached him interested me too.  His skin was the color of old brown leather and he had a big arched nose, clear light blue very shrewd eyes, and a big fringe or hedge of ragged white beard under his chin; and he was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown tweeds, evidently home-made.  When I spoke to him, saying something about the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch.  It was, he said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen and he had never seen anything made by man to equal it in beauty.  He had come, he told me, straight from his home and birthplace, a small village in the north of Scotland, shut out from the world by great hills where the heather grew knee-deep.  He had never been in England before, and had come directly to Salisbury on a visit to a relation.

“Well,” I said, “now you have looked at it outside come in with me and see the interior.”

But he refused:  it was enough for one day to see the outside of such a building:  he wanted no more just then.  To-morrow would be soon enough to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath and he would go and worship there.

“Are you an Anglican?” I asked.

He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village.  They had two Churches—­the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.

“And what,” said I, “will your minister say to your going to worship in a cathedral?  We have all denominations here in Salisbury, and you will perhaps find a Presbyterian place to worship in.”

“Now it’s strange your saying that!” he returned, with a dry little laugh.  “I’ve just had a letter from him the morning and he writes on this varra subject.  ‘Let me advise you,’ he tells me in the letter, ’to attend the service in Salisbury Cathedral.  Nae doot,’ he says, ’there are many things in it you’ll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps, and I’d like ye to go.’”

I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an ordination service, very long, complicated, and, I should imagine, exceedingly difficult to follow by a wild Presbyterian from the hills.  He probably disapproved of most of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day.  His method was better than that of an American (from Indiana, he told me) I met the following day at the hotel.  He gave two hours and a half, including attendance at the morning service, to the cathedral, inside and out, then rushed off for an hour at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a hired bicycle.  I advised him to take another day—­I did not want to frighten him by saying a week—­and he replied that that would make him miss Winchester.  After cycling back from Stonehenge he would catch a train to Winchester and get there in time to have some minutes in the cathedral before the doors closed.  He was due in London next morning.  He had already missed Durham Cathedral in the north through getting interested in and wasting too much time over some place when he was going there.  Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!