With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins of his own emotions Edwin was not long in deciding that his growing eagerness to see the beauty and strangeness of the world must have sprung from the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the shores of this great waterway. From Highberrow, his father had told him, you could see the whole expanse of the Bristol Channel. From Highberrow, perhaps, some forbear of his own had watched the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with the ebb tide. He was bewildered with the splendour of his heritage. It was impossible to imagine that Sir Joseph Hingston’s family had the least share in such a romantic past. In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, and Mr. Ingleby proposed that they should go for a walk through the city. He had known it well in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with an almost childish delight to show Edwin the things that he remembered. They passed through many narrow winding streets where the overhanging houses of the merchant venturers stood, and ancient churches had been huddled into corners by the growing city. “I remember every inch of it,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a happy laugh. Again they crossed the river, and skirting a line of shipping warehouses, now cavernous and deserted, they plunged into a sordid quarter full of sailors’ drinking dens that smelled of rum, and marine stores that smelled of tar. “Where are we going?” Edwin asked. “You’ll see in a minute,” said Mr. Ingleby. And, in a minute, Edwin saw. They had emerged from the huddled houses into a large open space, and in the midst of it rose a miracle of beauty such as Edwin had never seen before: a structure too delicate in its airy loveliness to have been built of stone; so fragile in its strength that it seemed impossible that the slender flying buttresses should support it. The shadowy spire could be seen dimly piercing a sky that had been washed to clearness by the rain; but inside the church, for some reason unknown, the lamps had been lighted, and the whole building glowed as though it had been one immense lantern. There could not be another miracle of this kind in the world, Edwin thought. He remembered a white model of the Taj Mahal at Agra, that stood beneath a dome of glass in Mrs. Barrow’s drawing-room, an intricate carving of ivory with a huge dome and many fretted minarets. Edwin remembered that the Taj Mahal was supposed to be one of the wonders of the world; but he could not believe that it was as beautiful as this: it was too fanciful, too complicated in its detail, while this church, for all its delicacy, was so amazingly simple in its design.