"So I got onto a Christopher Street ferry, and caught a crosstown and swung onto a Fourth Avenue and went out onto the front platform to smoke a cigar and watch the driver handle his team. Pretty soon a mail-wagon got across the tracks, and he had to pull up pretty sharp, and the handle of his brake caught me in the stomach. Did he throw a fit because he had hit a man who was smoking a twenty-five-cent cigar? He did not. He turns to me and says: 'Why the hell can't you keep your belly out of my brake?' Say, I could have kissed that man!" XV EDUCATION One day at Gloucester and one at Wells enabled us to get only hasty impressions of each. The west front of the latter was not so impressive as the pictures of it had led me to expect. Indeed, it looks like a sort of afterthought, and might as well have been put a hundred feet farther away for all the connection it has with the cathedral. However, when I am made an English bishop, it is Wells I shall choose for the bishop's garden! But Gloucester, like Rome, would require a lifetime to exhaust. The whole history of western ecclesiastical architecture is built into its walls. Like the English constitution, it is neither an evolution nor a revolution. It is a series of new things put onto the old. Perhaps for that reason it is so impressive. It is not logical, but it works! The rough Saxon stonework was not torn down when the more stately Norman was added but left standing to bear witness to the past. And so the various styles of Gothic, from the early pointed to the highly decorative, have in turn been added, and the result is a structure in some ways the most impressive in England and perfectly representative of the English people. I thought of "The Chambered Nautilus": "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll: Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast-- Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea." From Wells we returned to Bath, crossing the Mendips, or are they the Cotswolds? On the steep ascent we passed two bicyclists, a parson and a very pretty girl, evidently his daughter. I wished we had two vacant seats to offer them, for it is a stiff climb. We did offer the one we had to the pretty girl, but though she looked tired, she was a good sport, and declined to leave her father to toil up the hill alone. I hope he was grateful, but Englishmen have a way of accepting sacrifices from their womenfolk which we do not understand. At any rate, it was pleasant to see the companionship between the two. We spent the night at Bath in a pretentious and uncomfortable hotel, and moralized on Beau Brummel and his preposterous patron. I can never forgive Sir Walter Scott for his laudation of the Prince Regent, but, on the other hand, Thackeray's picture is as relentless as a portrait by Sargent.