Its final hoary humility is enhanced, to your mind, by the freedom with which you may approach it from any point in the town. Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness—of those random corners, projections, and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises and caprices and fantasies which lead to such refreshing exercise a vision benumbed by brown-stone fronts. An American is born to the idea that on his walks abroad it is perpetual level wall ahead of him, and such a revelation as he finds here of infinite accident and infinite effect gives a wholly novel zest to the use of his eyes. It produces too the reflection—a superficial and fallacious one perhaps—that amid all this cunning chiaroscuro of its _mise en scène_ life must have more of a certain homely entertainment. It is at least no fallacy to say that childhood—or the later memory of childhood—must borrow from such a background a kind of anecdotical wealth. We all know how in the retrospect of later moods the incidents of early youth “compose,” visibly, each as an individual picture, with a magic for which the greatest painters have no corresponding art. There is a vivid reflection of this magic in some of the early pages of Dickens’s “Copperfield” and of George Eliot’s “Mill on the Floss,” the writers having had the happiness of growing up among old, old things. Two or three of the phases of this rambling wall belong especially to the class of things fondly remembered. In one place it skirts the edge of the cathedral graveyard and sweeps beneath the great square tower and behind the sacred east window of the choir.