To our left, as he ceased, the evening's lingering glow gilded the silent pool, where lay the unrippled reflection of the three spires of the cathedral, hardly more unsubstantial than the fairy silhouette that stood clean-cut against the sky, and dividing with the reality the rapt admiration of the Poor Brother of St. John's. We stood by the water's edge, and he turned toward the phantom spires reversed within it, his talk wandering back to the days of the church's troubles,--when the cathedral close was a fortress, with strong walls and well-filled moat; when the beautiful west gate, which only our own age was vile enough to destroy, kept stout ward against the outer world, and protected the favored community who formed within the walls a county independent of Lichfield and of Staffordshire. Within the sacred pale no law had force save that of the Ecclesiastical Court, and then, as now, none could there be taken for debt or crime save on the warrant of the dean and chapter. He knew by heart the long list of bishops, and would gladly have held me to hear of the good deeds of Langton and Hackett. He was fairly launched in his favorite enthusiasm, and told warmly the more striking features of the church's history, but he told them rapidly lest I should reach the storied pile with less than a full appreciation of its traditional interest. From his nervous lips I learned how King Richard II. kept Christmas revels here with a splendor that lavished two hundred tuns of wine, and roasted two thousand oxen, whose bones are still found in Oxenbury field hard by; how Elizabeth passed three whole days in the close; and how the solidity of its fortification, the consummate grace and finish of its architecture, the richness of its sculpture, and the surpassing beauty and magnificence of the nine windows of its lady chapel marked it as the crowning glory of the Western Church, until the dark days of the Revolution lowered. Then its sore trials were recounted, and I learned of the fanatical attack of Lord Brooke, "with his horde of impious Roundheads," made by strange fatality on St. Chad's day; of the shooting of Lord Brooke by "Dumb Dyott," who was perched in the steeple with a fowling-piece that now hangs over the fireplace of Colonel Dyott's house; of the surrender of the close by Lord Chesterfield; of the sack and bout that followed; of the recapture by Prince Rupert.