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.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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