Now the secret of the men who built this lordly abbey is lost; never again will such a triumph of, alas! a dead art arise to charm and to delight, to instruct and inspire the children of men. But we may still preserve and reverently use this rare and noble legacy of a vanished age as a shrine and a peerless teaching-home--a prayer-home, in which are taught the great evangelical truths by which Christian men live and breathe and have their being, the saving knowledge of the work of the Precious Blood, the glad Redemption-story, the story loved of men; the story which never ages, never palls, but which, like dew, descends on each succeeding generation of believers, and gives them new stores of faith and hope and love. This--these things--we try to do, and not without success, for as God's bright glory-cloud once brooded over the sacred desert-tent and the holy Jerusalem Temple, so now upon our beloved and ancient cathedral, with its almost countless services of praise and prayer and teaching, God's blessing surely rests. "It sleeps," does our cathedral, as one has lately said in words beautiful as true--"it sleeps with its splendid dreams upon its lifted face." But it has, too, its many wakeful working hours. Not the least memorable of these will strike this week, when the charmed strains of Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, and of the great Englishmen, Gibbons and Boyce and Walmisley and Wesley, and last, but not least, of Hubert Parry, peal through these fretted vaults, "lingering and wandering on" among these wondrous chambers of inspired imagery; while the almost prophetic words of that truest English song-man Wordsworth become history:-- "Give all thou canst; high heaven rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more; So deem'd the man who fashion'd for the sense These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof Self-poised, and scoop'd into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering and wandering on as loth to die-- Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality." [Illustration: Decorative] [Illustration: A Hero in Disguise] A HERO IN DISGUISE A Complete Story. By M. Westrup. The girl was little, slender, insignificant--only her love made her heroic. The man was big, broad, one to be noticed in a crowd, and his love made him as helpless as a little child. They stood opposite each other in the poor, shabby little room. His eyes devoured her face wildly, incredulously, but her eyes were fixed on a great hole in the faded carpet.