We went inside. I saw that he took off his hat, a custom doubtless universal, and, what struck me much more, he adopted within the Cathedral a tone of whisper, not only much lower than his ordinary voice, but of quite a different quality, and I noticed that he was less erect as he walked, although his head was craned upward to look towards the roof. The stained glass especially pleased him, but there was much about it he did not understand. I told him that there could be seen there a copy of the Gospels of great antiquity which had belonged to St. Chad; but when I said this he smiled pleasantly, as though I had offered to show him the saddle of a Unicorn or the tanned skin of a Hippogriff. Had we not been in so sacred a place I believe he would have dug me in the ribs. “St. _Who_?” he whispered, looking slily sideways at me as he said it. “St. Chad,” I said. “He was the Apostle to Mercia.” But after that I could do no more with him. For the word “Saint” had put him into fairyland, and he was not such a fool as to mix up a name like Chad with one of the Apostles; and Mercia is of little use to men. However, there was no quarrelsomeness about him, and he peered at the writing curiously, pointing out to me that the letters were quite legible, though he could not make out the words which they spelled, and very rightly supposed it was a foreign language. He asked a little suspiciously whether it was the Gospel, and accepted the assurance that it was; so that his mind, sceptical to excess in some matters, found its balance by a ready credence in others and remained sane and whole. He was again touched by the glass in the Lady Chapel, and noted that it was of a different colour to the other and paler, so that he liked it less. I told him it was Spanish, and this apparently explained the matter to him, for he changed his face at once and began to give me the reason of its inferiority. He had not been in Spain, but he had evidently read much about the country, which was moribund. He pointed out to me the unnatural attitude of the figures in this glass, and contrasted its half-tones with the full-blooded colours of the modern work behind us, and he was particularly careful to note the irregularity of the lettering and the dates in this glass compared with the other which had so greatly struck him. I was interested in his fixed convictions relative to the Spaniards, but just as I was about to question him further upon that race I began to have my doubts whether the glass were not French. It was plainly later than the Reformation, and I should have guessed the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. But I hid the misgiving in my heart, lest the little trust in me which my companion still had should vanish altogether.