or not, and will furnish you with a list of trains for your own locality. But whether a particular one is the best for your purposes, whether you change before you arrive at your destination (the chances always are that you do), exactly at what time it arrives, and whether it stops, have been known to constitute a field of research too deep for him; and you feel as Cæsar did when he said, " Et tu, Brute!" The very guard is not much better authority, even for short distances; and sometimes your only resource, as was ours at Crewe, is to inquire madly right and left, of persons in uniform and without, make a rapid estimate of veracity, balance the probabilities, make your own decision while the bell is ringing, and fling yourself and your belongings desperately through a closing door, into a crowded compartment, trusting to Providence that you may at least fare as well as though you had decided it by casting lots!

If you take the right train, it is only a few minutes from Crewe to Chester. The latter is the usual portal to North Wales; and the distant mountains of Wales (Snowdon is too distant) are visible to the left before you reach its fine station, which is of imposing dimen

VOL. II.- - 8

sions even for Great Britain. The River Dee,

across whose sands Mary called the cattle home" in Kingsley's familiar ballad, winds lovingly around its red sandstone walls; and it is quite the most mediæval in appearance of all English towns. This attracts many tourists, and the more so from the fact that, to those arriving at Liverpool, it is the first natural stopping-place on the way to London. The famous Roman twentieth legion was encamped here in the first century, before the fall of Jerusalem; and the name of the city, which appears so often in composition, - like Winchester, Lancaster, and Leicester,- perpetuates the Latin castra (camp). Saxon heathen won their last victory here over early Celtic Christianity; William the Norman found it the last city to surrender to him; and the heir apparent has been Earl of Chester since Henry III.'s time, as well as Prince of Wales since Edward II. was born to Queen Eleanor at neighboring Carnarvon Castle in the following reign.

We drove for luncheon to the old-time Blossom's Inn, outside the East Gate; but found it was being modernized, and had to content ourselves with a grill-room near by. Whether it is true that the Romans cut the two main

streets, which cross at right angles, out of solid rock below the level of the houses, I am not sure; but the houses themselves are curious enough, though far less so than in many continental cities like Munich and Nuremberg. Continuous arcades, reached by flights of steps and full of shops, take the place of the front rooms of the first floors in Eastgate, Bridge, and Watergate Streets; and in the latter stand the finest three old timber-built houses imaginable, Stanley Palace, Bishop Lloyd's House, and God's-Providence House. The latter's inscription, "God's Providence is mine inheritance," is a grateful recognition of immunity from the seventeenth-century plague which made such awful havoc in London.

We drove on to the old castle, now a barracks, and looked south over the Dee to Eaton Hall, the magnificent seat of the wealthiest English subject, the Duke of Westminster. But who thinks of His Grace the noble Duke in connection with Chester, when only a little distance farther away on the opposite side of the city lived the greatest of all English commoners? It was but a few weeks after our passage that Hawarden Church was to receive an added interest, in the sudden death within its walls of

Benson, the Primate of the Church of England, while worshipping where his host, Mr. Gladstone, has so often read the Lessons in the Daily Service; and now, alas! Gladstone himself has joined the choir invisible. One may view the famous city walls in a short time; and there is no easier way than to climb the steps at the North Gate, and walk around behind the parapets by way of Phoenix Tower to the cathedral. I know of no city walls so entirely satisfying as these. Much of the line of the old Roman circumvallation has been followed, and part of what remains is Norman. Except at the southeast, near ancient St. John's Church (at one time the cathedral), they are not encroached upon by buildings; and the finest view of the massive red sandstone cathedral is had from the ramparts, which sweep around the close near the East Gate. They are not in the least ruinous, though six centuries old; and their northern line overhangs the present canal, doubtless once a moat. From Phoenix Tower Charles I. saw his troops defeated on Rowton Moor; and the mellow dignity of the walls gains trebly in interest from their being nearly the sole example left intact of an English city's defences in the feudal ages.