SALISBURY 165 



Superintendent of His Majesty's Mails. In it you 

 see Josepli Pike, tlie guard, rising to shoot the 

 very heraldic - looking lioness, and the passengers 

 encouraging him in the background, from the safe 

 retreat of the first-floor windows. It will be observed 

 that this is apparently the lioness's first spring, and 

 yet those passengers are already upstairs : at once a 

 striking testimony to their agility and a warranty of 

 the exquisite truth of the saying that fear lends wings 

 to the feet. 



XXV 



Salisbury spire and the distant city come with 

 the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these 

 bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed 

 wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three 

 Mile Hill, down, down, dow^n to the lowlands on a 

 smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees 

 and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around 

 and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet 

 ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed 

 spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the 

 story of its having been built to its extraordinary 

 height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the 

 strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of 

 Salisbury Plain may readily be believed. 



Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, 

 and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age. 

 Few places in England have so well-ascertained an 



