IN QUEST OK RARE SONGSTERS 155 



of a golden oriole, when I listened to it in a strictly- 

 guarded \vot)d, where it breeds annually and where I 

 was permitted to spend a day, was more to me than the 

 sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and cathedrals, 

 and more than adventures among the people. 



This, then, is but a hasty and careless itinerary. 



Going west I was at Bland ford, then at Wimbome, 

 where I found nothing in the town to detain me except 

 the minster, and nothing in that but the whiteness of 

 the stones with which it is built, with here and there 

 one of a surprising red placed at random, giving the 

 structure a harlecjuin appearance, unlike that of any 

 other church known to me. At Wareham, a small 

 ancient village-like town in a beautiful unspoilt-looking 

 country, I was long in S. Mary's Church, absorbed in 

 the contemplation of Edward the Martyr's stone coffin, 

 when a great gloom came over the earth and made the 

 interior almost dark. Coming out I was astonished to 

 find that while I had been in there with the coffin and 

 the poor boy-king's ghost, the streets outside had been 

 turned into muddy, rushing torrents, and going to a 

 group of men standing near, I asked them where all 

 that water came from. "From above, I imagine," re- 

 plied one, smiling at my simplicity, which reply brought 

 back to my mind a story of a good little boy read in 

 my childhood. This little boy had been religiously 

 taught to say about everything painful or unpleasant 

 which befell him, from the loss of a toy or a wetting 

 or a birching, to an attack of measles or mumps or 

 scarlatina, that it "came from above." Now one day. 



