And yet though we played Pirates all day, and collected clouded yellows all day, and printed the most exquisite poems as well as writing them, and held Chapters, and did a certain amount of holiday-task, and rode with my father, and drove with my mother, there was always time for other excitements. There was bathing in the Fal, there were picnics at Perran, especially when a south-west gale had been blowing, and from seven miles inland there was audible the thump of Atlantic waves on that bleak beach. Then in Truro itself there were great things to be done, for the volcanic energy of my father had soon kindled the county into pouring out money for the erection of a new Cathedral, the first that had been built in England since the time of the Reformation. St. Mary’s Church was the site of it, and to-day an aisle of St. Mary’s (the rest of a wonderfully hideous church being demolished) forms the baptistery of the Cathedral. The ground was cleared and foundations were dug, and slowly the great stately building began to rise flower-like from the barren soil. I do not suppose that any of us cared independently two straws about a Cathedral, but to go down there with my father, and hear him talk to Mr. Bubb, the Clerk of the Works, infected us with his noble zeal, and the rising walls got pleasingly confused with the rebuilding of the temple by Nehemiah, and the vision of the New Jerusalem. Hugh, I am certain, was allowed to lay a stone himself, and Mr. Bubb presented him with the trowel and mallet with which he had laid it. Or did we all lay stones? I seem to hear my father say in an awestruck voice, “There, you have helped to build Truro Cathedral!” but I am not sure whether that was said to me or not, and my uncertainty is the measure, I am afraid, of the impression that the building of the Cathedral really made on me....