If this were the Hereford of the first half of the seventeenth century, the city has dimmed a little since, yet we found it a pleasant town enough, with the Wye murmuring beside it, and its ancient cathedral of heroic history reposing in its midst. Garrick was born in Hereford, and poor Nell Gwynne, and in the north transept of the cathedral is a brass to John Philips, who endeared himself to all the county by his poem on "Cyder." We went to see the Preaching Cross that marks the site of a monastery of the Black Friars, neighboured now by the Red Cross Hospital for old soldiers and servants. One of these beneficiaries, in the prescribed "fustian suit of ginger colour," eagerly showed us about and was sorely grieved that we could not wait to hear his rambling chronicle to the end. The rest of our time in Hereford outside our hostelry--the Green Dragon, most amiable of monsters--we spent in the cathedral, an old acquaintance, but so passing rich in beauties and in curiosities that at the end of our swift survey we were hardly more satisfied than at the beginning. We will come back to it some time--to the grave old church that has grown with the centuries and, unabashed, mingles the styles of various periods, the church in which Stephen was crowned and Ethelbert buried; to the croziered bishops in their niches, the two great, thirteenth-century bishops among them, D'Aquablanca, the worst of saints with the loveliest of tombs, and Cantilupe, so godly that he never allowed his sister to kiss him, of such healing virtues that even sick falcons were cured at his shrine; to the Knights Templars, mail-clad, treading down fell beasts; to the wimpled dames with praying hands, shadowed by angel-wings; to the Chapter Library with its chained tomes; and to that mediæval _Mappa Mundi_ (about 1313) showing the earth with its encircling ocean, Eden and Paradise above, and such unwonted geographical features sprinkled about as the Phoenix, Lot's Wife, and the Burial Place of Moses. Our surly coachman deposited us at Ross, the little border town with houses sloping from the hilltop to the Wye, while behind and above the mall rises a tall grey spire. Here our faith in human nature was promptly restored by that contemplation of the virtues of The Man of Ross which even the public-house signboards forced upon us. This John Kyrle so lauded by Pope, was a cheery old bachelor of modest income, the most of which he expended for the town in works of practical benevolence, planting elms, laying out walks, placing fountains, and caring for the poor. "Whose cause-way parts the vale with shady rows? Whose seats the weary traveler repose? Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise? 'The Man of Ross,' each lisping babe replies." But the lisping babes are wrong as to this last particular, for Kyrle did not build the spire, although he gave the church its gallery and pulpit.