A CITY OF BIRDS 51 



spring, is a time of preparation, and if the one garnishes, 

 the other sweeps the house. Spring writes the prelude 

 to summer, autumn stores its material for spring. " O 

 wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind ? " The 

 poets are so often the prophets of biological truth, for 

 the wind scatters the seeds. Autumn is indeed at once 

 prodigal and provident ; the balance of life is being 

 spent, only to be invested for the future. Spring is 

 not always a " faerie's child," and autumn is a burning 

 bush, so much an image of intense life that one cannot 

 believe it will be consumed. Here is an account of a 

 spring visit in which age was strangely mingled with 

 youth and beauty with ugliness. There is a wonderful 

 place some half a dozen miles from the cathedral 

 town. It is famous for yet another cathedral, not built 

 with human hands, with its pinnacles rising out of the 

 massive, battlemented rocks three hundred feet high ; 

 its parapets, gables, screens, arcades and canopies cut 

 by the First Architect out of their own element, and 

 the carvings and traceries — the grace of strength, the 

 delicacy of grandeur — the ivy, hawthorn, mountain ash and 

 creeping plants that lace the sheer walls. This cathedral is 

 hewn out of the limestone cliffs, once, no doubt, the walls 

 of a sea-cavern whose roof fell in with the action of the 

 sea-waves. Its graveyard, or cloister-garth, if I must 

 speak more elegantly, is economically built into the 

 walls, since the limestone is a conglomerate mass of 

 petrified life, a vast biographical museum of a world 

 which had not yet conceived the sombre idea of man. 

 Before the deep gorge, with the cliffs soaring on either 

 side, is reached, one passes through a straggling village, 

 and beyond it come the caves, plastered over with 

 tin shanties, refreshment booths, advertisement posters 

 and a loathsome white pagoda conspicuous for miles 

 round. On the other side of the street runs a dirty 

 little mud and bottle-encumbered brook, occasionally 

 broadening into pools, so that on one side we have 

 Victorian picturesqueness a little damaged, and on 

 the other a transplanted Earl's Court Exhibition — two 

 civilizations nagging across at one another their superior 

 advantages. 



