“Hac sunt in fossa Bedae venerabilis ossa,”
and recalled the story of the monk’s worry over his hexameter, his lucky nap, and the opportune help of that convenient angel, who fixed it up “all right” while he slept the sleep of the righteous. I saw the carved image of the Dun Cow, from which it got its name. I am not so sure that legend is so familiar to you. It took hard work, innumerable questions, search and research, for me to get hold of it, quaint and simple as it is. In that seven years’ quest for a resting-place for the corpse, the monks had stopped with it at a place called Ward Law, from which they could not move it, it seeming fastened to the ground. This set them all praying to know where they should take it. The answer to their prayer was, “Dunholme” (Durham). As they were searching about in great perplexity, they heard a woman, who was looking for her stray cow, call to her neighbor, asking if she had seen it. The cry back was: “She is at Dunholme.” Behold! this quest was ended. And the cow is a beauty of the kind that makes one wish she could be driven home into his own pasture, to be “a possession forever.” She stands sleek and serene in her niche in the outer wall, and seems to follow you with a watchful gaze as you pluck buttercups and clover-blooms, lineal descendants, beyond a doubt, of those on which her prototype fed in the spacious close beneath her.
We tarried atop that green hill and in those sacred precincts, till the fainter day that is far from twilight, though the sun is long gone, warned us of the late hour. Such an evening as we had in ancient Durham—“a dirty hole in general,” as a little Scotch boy wrote of it in 1820. And a little American woman verifies it to-day. First, a street concert by Highlanders in full national costume, with their screeching bagpipes. They ended and vanished. Then came trooping by a large body of the Salvation Army, with their leader, a woman, facing her forces and keeping time with a stick to their singing. She looked like a wild creature, and the spectacle was one more conducive to speculation than to admiration. As their frantic strains died away in the distance, a sweet, clear-ringing child voice burst forth. It soared up to us like a lark,
“Singing as it soars and soaring as it sings.”
We opened our windows and saw a young boy standing in the street alone and without any instrument, singing with an absorption that made him oblivious to his surroundings. He did not even notice the fall of the pennies for which he was singing, till a woman, who had stopped to hear him, gathered them up and put them into his hands.
We felt as if we were listening to an incipient Brignoli. He went too. At eleven o’clock, the daylight not yet merged in night, we fell asleep to harp music, played by a band of Gypsies in most picturesque garb. We hurried to the cathedral next morning for “choral service,” and heard some fine music, which attuned us to our loitering among its ancient memorials. After some hours inside we came out into the lovely day, and strolled off for a walk. From the crest of the hill on which the cathedral is built to the water’s edge its wooded sides are laid out in beautiful shady walks. There we wandered, keeping up a running fire of exclamations at the beautiful broken views, gathering now a wild flower, now a fern, or stretching up for a leaf from the masses of thick foliage on the trees overhead. How the hours shot by! Atop of the hill again, we found our way into a castle, in close neighborhood to the cathedral, a charming old piece of antiquity, with its stores of rare, old curious things. I could fill a quire of old-fashioned letter paper and not do half justice to it. So I shan’t say anything more about it, but shut both eyes and mouth and get away from Durham, already grown fascinating enough to make me wish I could live in the shadow of that ancient pile with its “gothic shade.”
Our route hither lay for the most part of the way along the coast of the German ocean. The white breakers burst right beneath us sometimes, sending their roar to our ears. Away off occasionally glimmered a dream-like sail, or a phantom stretch of smoke from some passing-out-of-our-world vessel. Near enough for a good view we saw,
“Markworth, proud of Percy’s name,”
very literally a “castle by the sea,” as it seemed as if washed by its waves. The country landward was prettily rolling and laid off in fields of grain and pasture. Great flocks of sheep speckled the latter. A Scotch lady got into our “compartment” when we were still some miles from “Dun Edin.” She was very companionable and pointed out all the features of note as they came in sight.
The sun as it went down was a great puzzle to us; it seemed to be setting in the east, and we could not get it to fit the points of the compass stowed away in our craniums. You see it did not set till nearer nine than eight o’clock, and that gave it time to get almost round to where it had started from! The Scotch welcome quite won our hearts. We had written and engaged rooms a week before, so knew we would be expected. The landlady and three daintily-arrayed maids were in the hall, and the former, Mrs. Campbell, stepped forward and took our hands, with the sweetest-voiced welcome! We felt at home at once. Just here I think I must give you a list of the people collected under her roof—tourists, here for a day or weeks, as may chance: an Episcopal High Church curate, from Wales; a Mrs. Smith and her daughter, from Australia; a Mr. Bruce, from the Cape of Good Hope (he was there when Stanley went there with the remnant of the host that made the trip with him “Across the Dark Continent”); a Mr. Masters and wife, from another part of South Africa, he an emigrant from Yorkshire and she a native born, but the daughter of an emigrant; a lady who resides in Oxford and is enthusiastic about it as a place of residence; two young ladies from the south of England; another two, sisters, from London; a Miss Gurley, a Scotch maiden lady, a great traveler and linguist, and altogether charming. She had been to the United States and Canada, three times. While in the United States, she was the guest of Bishop Potter. She belongs to Edinburgh, is living across the Firth, among the hills of Fife, not far from royal Falkland. Add us three Americans, and I think it could be called a mixed household, indeed,