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"J IT ' '1 14 Xs lllj iS&JJWk v, 7 L h if " St. Cross, Winchester. King's Lambourn; Alexander Pope, a boy from fair Twyford village, musing already upon the nature of man; John Keble of the "Christian Year," from bis vicarage at Hursley; John Keats, from over Hazeley Down, with the "Ode to Autumn" fashioning itself in liis mind : Where are the sons of spring aye where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music, mu-sic, too. While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day. And toiifh the stubble-plains with rosy hue and matching the best of these in genius and in charm the gentle author au-thor of "Emma" and "Northanger Abbey" Ab-bey" from her modest home by the cathedral close. Truly a goodly five! Hereabouts the path mounts awhile from the river lied, beside hedges, that are vocal with the soft flutter of wings, the fluting of hidden birds, and the sudden stir and rustle of small hedgerow life. Drawn by patient brown ponies, slowly mounting the hill, come two gypsy-carts, green-painted, green-painted, from whose rickety chimneys long wreaths of blue smoke curl upward up-ward and vanish. The weather-tanned nomads, each at a horse's bead, the cheeky, eager-eyed, tangled boys behind be-hind them, the momentary glimpses of a "home," caught through half-open doors,, leave somehow, a sense of alluring al-luring vagabondage. A moment later I am down in the valley meadows again, where going is not easy over those winter sodden ways. But what matter mud and water, when every cqpse is bursting into leaf, and the young spring carols in your ears? Even the pink pigs cease from their nosing on the bank, to gaze and grunt acquiescence. Two gray mares cock their ears, and stare; a speckled trout splashes from under my very feet, ankle-deep In the flood 'tbat pours joyously through every water-gate. water-gate. Across bridge after bridge, wading rather than walking, I reach terra flrma again, and soon am resting beneath the big yew tree that stands beside Twyford church. ON THIS morning of spring, when the sun. at last, after many weeks of retirement, lias shown ids golden face above the eastward downs, any city even so fair a city as Winchester seems for the moment, undesirable. One seeks instinctively a wider sky-space, sky-space, hills and meadows, and the flow of the new-fallen waters for company. These are in the valley of the Itchen, writes a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. Through the cathedral close the way lies, down the avenue, past the western door and out before the spaces of emerald lawn, above which towers this majestic pile, within whose walls, and around them, are memoried so much of England's history, from great Alfred and Chanute, past William of Wykeham and Wolsey, to the modern mod-ern men of learning and lawn sleeves. Beautifully harmonious are the surroundings, sur-roundings, both in line and color soft grays of full round Norman arches, vivid greens of cloister-garth, blending with the darker tints of immemorial yews, and the golden sheen of lchens upon gnarled tree-trunks. Here are rich reds and browns, upon the tiled copings of mossy walls, on barge-boards barge-boards of ancient gabled roofs and in the delicate rose-pink network of Interlacing In-terlacing twigs, through which the cathedral town is seen. Thus, among ever-changing charms, you twist and turn, now round a corner, beneath the shadow of an arch, now out again into the full sunlight, before another bend leads you once more through the pleasant pleas-ant gloom of the eastern gate. Beside Wykeham's college, modestly fronting the road, is a little bumble, buff-colored building,, with an oriel winnow, and a legend reminding us that here Jane Austen lived her later days. Her house, among so many surrounding sur-rounding grandeurs, wears as I suppose sup-pose the writer herself wore an air of shy timidity, not without grace in these, sometimes, too blatant days. Here are Wykehamists, fresh-faced, in straw hats, symbolizing a coining summer, and here, past the gray ruin.; of Wolsey castle where Mary of England, before her marriage, feted her Spanish husband-to-be are the fresh green water-meadows of the lichen, and beyond, clear-cut against the skyline, the tree-crested ridge of St. Catherine's hill, with memories of King Cliarles II and of the college's "Pulee Domum." The Waters Splash and Bubble. On either side the meadow path the waters splash and bubble, swish and eddy with a music most melodious and meaningful, even to those unlearned un-learned in fish lore. Gray gulls hover, mirrored in the shining surface, and linger over it, so as to set one wondering won-dering what lure it uas that led them from their open sea into this inland Hampshire valley. Down below, above a sandy bed, the forest of fern-like fern-like water weeds bends to Hi" current, and the minnows or the minnow-kind dart and play about ils glades. Right ahead there is age-long majesty again the gabled roofs and lowered church of the Hospital of St. Cross, embowered in ancestral elms. Here I sit, upon a white stile, to enjoy a Meeting Meet-ing glimpse of a thatched roof, and watch, across the sliding water-mirror, the fringe of pink feathery grasses nodding and quivering to the breeze. I am tempted almost to go into the 1 hospital, and demand the "Wayfarer's Dole" not that I want the dole which, moreover, is meager during these days but that it is pleasant to partake of a charity practiced for so many centuries by the brethren in red and black. Some say I hardly know with what truth that St. Cross is the hospital in which Anthony Trollope placed "The Warden" of the novel so named, and of "Barchesfer Towers." Trollope, in his autobiography names Salisbury, not Winton, as the city in which lie first conceived t lie story oi that gentle priest; but. Barse.tshire being a county of bis own imagining, lie may well have conjured a little with English topography. And, thinking think-ing of-Trollope while my eyes linger upon t lie crocus-gemmed lawns of St. Cross, and the orange-budded chestnut twigs shiny with flowing ap how many others, famous in literature, have trod these velvet paihs. and those of the hills on either hand ! A Goodly Five. "Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster" perhaps from his place at |
