This first afternoon trip was pleasant enough, acquainting me as it did with the character of the country about Bridgely Level for miles and miles. Up to this time I had been commiserated on the fact that it was winter and I was seeing England under the worst possible conditions, but I am not so sure that it was such a great disadvantage. To-day as we sped down some damp, slippery hillside where the river Thames was to be seen far below twisting like a letter S in the rain, I thought to myself that light and color--summer light and color--would help but little. The villages that we passed were all rain-soaked and preternaturally solemn. There were few if any people abroad. We did not pass a single automobile on the way to Penn and but a single railroad track. These little English villages for all the extended English railway system, are practically without railway communication. You have to drive or walk a number of miles to obtain suitable railway connection. I recall the sag-roofed, moss-patterned, vine-festooned cottages of once red but now brownish-green brick, half hidden behind high brick walls where curiously clipped trees sometimes stood up in sentinel order, and vines and bushes seemed in a conspiracy to smother the doors and windows in an excess of knitted leafage. Until you see them no words can adequately suggest the subtlety of age and some old order of comfort, once prevailing, but now obsolete, which these little towns and separate houses convey. You know, at a glance, that they are not of this modern work-a-day world. You know at a glance that no power under the sun can save them. They are of an older day and an older thought--the thought perhaps that goes with Gray’s “Elegy” and Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and “Deserted Village.” That night at dinner, before and after, we fell into a most stirring argument. As I recall, it started with Sir Scorp’s insisting that St. Paul’s of London, which is a product of the skill of Sir Christopher Wren, as are so many of the smaller churches of London, was infinitely superior externally to the comparatively new and still unfinished Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. With that I could not agree. I have always objected, anyhow, to the ground plan of the Gothic cathedral, namely, the cross, as being the worst possible arrangement which could be devised for an interior. It is excellent as a scheme for three or four interiors--the arms of the cross being always invisible from the nave--but as one interior, how can it compare with the straight-lying basilica which gives you one grand forward sweep, or the solemn Greek temple with its pediment and glorifying rows of columns. Of all forms of architecture, other things being equal, I most admire the Greek, though the Gothic exteriorly, even more than interiorly, has a tremendous appeal. It is so airy and florate.