SAXON CHAPEL AT BRADFORD
Wholly unchanged in form since it was built in the eighth century
break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must be the lot of youths in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it sometimes seemed, the greatest ugliness ever devised by a Yankee carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such dwellings.
But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times when the English seemed to build with an instinct for domestic comfort earlier unknown and later lost; but otherwise Bradford was of stone, stony. It studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there were moments when it might have looked Italian.
Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guardhouse which had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweetness in a minister of the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke?
The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that character, but when he put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman’s boots in honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us out on the other side.
His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered houses which were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their horror in delicate French and become abattoirs; but as that street in Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we could have wished for the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within, but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort of others. The house was that Kingston House, world-famous for having been reproduced in papier-maché at the last Universal Exposition in Paris, which a wealthy cloth-manufacturer had had built for himself about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was full of beautiful Italian feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England), faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur of a mill somewhere beyond the Avon.
There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy farmer, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee-deep in the manure, with the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get milk from in America, but if we could have that