The great curiosity, however, in Chester, is the Chester Cathedral, and the old walls that encompass the city. I never realized the force of the expression "the corroding tooth of time" till I saw this magnificent old cathedral: portions of it which were once sharply sculptured in various designs are now worn almost smooth by age, the old red sandstone looking as though time had sand-papered it with gritty hail and honeycombed its stones with melting rains; but the whole was surrounded with a mellow, softened beauty of groined arches, beautiful curves, dreamy old cloisters, and quaint carving, that invested even the ruined portion with a hallowed beauty. The stained-glass windows, both old and modern, are glorious colored wonders; the chapel where the services are now held is the same where, a thousand years ago, dreamy old monks told their beads; and there are their stalls or seats, so contrived as to afford but partial rest, so that if the sitter slumbered they fell forward with his weight, and threw him to the floor.

The antique wood carving upon the seats and pews here, now blackened and hardened almost to ebony in appearance, is very fine, excellently executed, and well preserved. High above ran around the nuns' walk, with occasional openings, whence the meek-eyed sisterhood could hear service below without being seen themselves as they came from their quiet cloisters near at hand, a quadrangle of one hundred and ten feet square, in which were four covered walks looking upon the enclosed garden, now a neglected greensward, where several forgotten old abbots slumber peacefully beneath great stone slabs with obliterated inscriptions.

The curious grope into some of the old cells, and most of us go down under the building in the crypt, where the massive Gothic pillars, that support the pile, still in perfect preservation, bring vividly to mind those canvas representations of prison scenes one sees upon the stage.

Inside the cathedral were numerous very old monuments and mementos of the past; among others an immense tapestry wrought by nuns hundreds of years ago, and representing Elymas struck with blindness. The enormous size of these cathedrals strikes the "fresh" American tourist with wonder. Fancy churches five times as large as ours, and the height inside from sixty to one hundred feet from the stone floor to the arched ceiling, lighted with glorious great windows of stained glass, upon which the stories of the Bible are told in colored pictures, and south, east, west, transepts, nave, and choir, crowded with relics of the past, that you have read of in the story-books of youth, and again upon the pages of history in maturer years; artistic sculptures, old monuments, statues, carvings, and curious remains.

In the chapter-house connected with the cathedral, we were shown the colors carried by the Cheshire regiment on the field of Waterloo; and it was interesting for me to grasp with my sacrilegious American hand one of the colors borne by a British regiment in America during the war of the Revolution.

We also visited the ecclesiastical court-room in which the Bishop of Chester, in 1554, tried a Protestant minister, George Marsh, and sentenced him to be burned for heresy. The seats of the judges and chair of the accused are still preserved and shown to the visitor, who generally desires to sit in the martyr's seat, and finds it, even for a few minutes, an uncomfortable one.

The Chester Cathedral is said to have been founded in the year 200, and was used as a place of safety against the Danes in 800. It was well kept, and ruled by abbots, and its history well preserved from the time of King William Rufus, who was killed in New Forest, 1093, down to 1541.

The old walls of Chester are the great attraction of the city; in fact, Chester is the only city in Great Britain that has preserved its old walls entire: they enclose the city proper, and are about two miles in circumference, affording a delightful promenade and prospect of the surrounding country. The walls are squarely built of a soft red freestone, something like that used for our "brown stone front" houses, though apparently not so hard a material, and vary from twelve to forty feet in height. A fresh tourist from a new country like our own begins to feel he is communing with the past, as he walks over these old walls, erected A. D. 61, and finds their chronology to read thus:—

A. D.
61—Walls built by Romans.
73—Marius, King of the Britons, extended the walls.
607—The Britons defeated under the walls.
907—The walls rebuilt by daughter of Alfred the Great.
1224—An assessment for repairing the walls.
1399—Henry of Lancaster mustered his troops under these walls.
1645—The Parliamentary forces made a breach in these walls.

So that it will be seen they have looked down upon some of the most eventful scenes of history; and as we strolled along, thinking what a feeble obstacle they would prove against the formidable engines of modern warfare, we came to a tower called the Phœnix Tower; and an inscription upon it informs the visitor that upon this tower King Charles I. stood in 1645, and witnessed the defeat of his army on Rowton Moor, four miles off, then a barren field, but now a smiling plain of fields and cottages, looking very unlike a barren moor, or the scene of a sanguinary combat. In this old tower a curious, antiquary sort of old fellow keeps a motley collection of curiosities, among which were Havelock's spurs, buckles of Queen Mary's time, bean from tree planted by Washington (!), and a great, staring, size-of-life wood-cut of Abraham Lincoln, besides coins, relics, &c., that were labelled to interest, but whose genuineness might not stand the test of too close an investigation.