: A Cathedral Courtship by Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith - Love stories; Diary fiction; Americans England Fiction; England Description and travel Fiction

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A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

BY KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

LONDON: GAY AND BIRD 5 CHANDOS STREET STRAND 1893

First Edition June 1893. Second Edition July 1893. Third Edition September 1893. Fourth Edition November 1893. Fifth Edition October 1894.

TO MY BOSTON FRIEND SALEMINA NO ANGLOMANIAC, BUT A TRUE BRITON

SHE

We are traveling under the yoke of an iron itinerary, warranted neither to bend nor break. It was made out by a young High Church curate in New York, and if it had been blessed by all the bishops and popes it could not be more sacred to aunt Celia. She is awfully High Church, and I believe she thinks this tour of the cathedrals will give me a taste for ritual and bring me into the true fold. I have been hearing dear old Dr. Kyle a great deal lately, and aunt Celia says that he is the most dangerous Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, she was engaged to a young architect. He, with his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an imaginary scale-drawing of her heart , which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal there, on which he has remained ever since. He has been only a memory for many years, to be sure, for he died at the age of twenty-six, before he had had time to build anything but a livery stable and a country hotel. This is fortunate, on the whole, because aunt Celia thinks he was destined to establish American architecture on a higher plane,--rid it of its base, time-serving, imitative instincts, and waft it to a height where, in the course of centuries, we should have been revered and followed by all the nations of the earth. I went to see the livery stable, after one of these Miriam-like flights of prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn't fair to judge a man's promise by one performance, and that one a livery stable, so I shall say nothing.

This sentiment about architecture and this fondness for the very toppingest High Church ritual cause aunt Celia to look on the English cathedrals with solemnity and reverential awe. She has given me a fat notebook, with "Katharine Schuyler" stamped in gold letters on the Russia leather cover, and a lock and key to protect its feminine confidences. I am not at all the sort of girl who makes notes, and I have told her so; but she says that I must at least record my passing impressions, if they are ever so trivial and commonplace.

I wanted to go directly from Southampton to London with the Abbotts, our ship friends, who left us yesterday. Roderick Abbott and I had had a charming time on board ship , and the prospect of seeing London sights together was not unpleasing; but Roderick Abbott is not in aunt Celia's itinerary, which reads: "Winchester, Salisbury, Wells, Bath, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, London, Ely, Lincoln, York, Durham."

Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and when they are thrown in contact with those who are born to be commanded all goes as merry as a marriage bell; otherwise not.

So here we are at Winchester; and I don't mind all the Roderick Abbotts in the universe, now that I have seen the Royal Garden Inn, its pretty coffee-room opening into the old-fashioned garden, with its borders of clove pinks, its aviaries, and its blossoming horse-chestnuts, great towering masses of pink bloom!

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