Since that visit to Salisbury, described in a former chapter, when I watched and listened to the doves in those cold days in early spring, I have been there a good many times, but never at the time when the bird colony is most interesting to observe, just before and during the early part of the breeding-season. At length, in the early days of June, 1908, the wished opportunity was mine—wished yet feared, seeing that it was possible some disaster had fallen upon that unique colony of stock-doves. It is true they appeared to be long established and well able to maintain their foothold on the building in spite of malicious persecuting daws, but there was nothing to show that they had been long there, seeing that it had been observed by no person but myself that the cathedral doves were stock-doves and not the domestic pigeon found on other large buildings. Great was my happiness to find them still there, as well as the daws and all the other feathered people who make this great building their home; even the kestrels were not wanting. There were three there one morning, quarrelling with the daws in the old way in the old place, halfway up the soaring spire. The doves were somewhat diminished in number, but there were a good many pairs still, and I found no dead young ones lying about, as they were now probably grown too large to be ejected, but several young daws, about a dozen I think, fell to the ground during my stay. Undoubtedly they were dragged out of their nests and thrown down, perhaps by daws at enmity with their parents, or it may be by the doves, who are not meek-spirited, as we have seen, or they would not be where they are, and may on occasion retaliate by invading their black enemies' nesting-holes.

Swallows, martins, and swifts were numerous, the martins especially, and it was beautiful to see them for ever wheeling about in a loose swarm about the building. They reminded me of bees and flies, and sometimes with a strong light on them they were like those small polished black and silvery-white beetles (Gyrinus) which we see in companies on the surface of pools and streams, perpetually gliding and whirling about in a sort of complicated dance. They looked very small at a height of a couple of hundred feet from the ground, and their smallness and numbers and lively and eccentric motions made them very insect-like.

The starlings and sparrows were in a small minority among the breeders, but including these there were seven species in all, and as far as I could make out numbered about three hundred and fifty birds—probably the largest wild bird colony on any building in England.

Nor could birds in all this land find a more beautiful building to nest on, unless I except Wells Cathedral solely on account of its west front, beloved of daws, and where their numerous black company have so fine an appearance. Wells has its west front; Salisbury, so vast in size, is yet a marvel of beauty in its entirety; and seeing it as I now did every day and wanting nothing better, I wondered at my want of enthusiasm on a previous visit. Still, to me, the bird company, the sight of their airy gambols and their various voices, from the deep human-like dove tone to the perpetual subdued rippling, running-water sound of the aerial martins, must always be a principal element in the beautiful effect. Nor do I know a building where Nature has done more in enhancing the loveliness of man's work with her added colouring. The way too in which the colours are distributed is an example of Nature's most perfect artistry; on the lower, heavier buttressed parts, where the darkest hues should be, we find the browns and rust-reds of the minute aerial alga, mixed with the greys of lichen, these darker stainings extending upwards to a height of fifty or sixty feet, in places higher, then giving place to more delicate hues, the pale tender greens and greenish greys, in places tinged with yellow, the colours always appearing brightest on the smooth surface between the windows and sculptured parts. The effect depends a good deal on atmosphere and weather: on a day of flying clouds and a blue sky, with a brilliant sunshine on the vast building after a shower, the colouring is most beautiful. It varies more than in the case of colour in the material itself or of pigments, because it is a "living" colour, as Crabbe rightly says in his lumbering verse:

Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the colours of a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens and the aerial alga called iolithus.

Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would not have fascinated me as it did during this last visit. It would have left me cold though all the architects and artists had assured me that it was the most perfectly beautiful building on earth.

I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the discovery that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this cathedral without a sense of fatigue or depression than in any other one known to me, because it has less of that peculiar character which we look for and almost invariably find in our cathedrals. It has not the rich sombre majesty, the dim religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the other great fanes. So airy and light is it that it is almost like being out of doors. You do not experience that instantaneous change, as of a curtain being drawn excluding the light and air of day and of being shut in, which you have on entering other religious houses. This is due, first, to the vast size of the interior, the immense length of the nave, and the unobstructed view one has inside owing to the removal by the "vandal" Wyatt of the old ponderous stone screen—an act for which I bless while all others curse his memory; secondly, to the comparatively small amount of stained glass there is to intercept the light. So graceful and beautiful is the interior that it can bear the light, and light suits it best, just as a twilight best suits Exeter and Winchester and other cathedrals with heavy sculptured roofs. One marvels at a building so vast in size which yet produces the effect of a palace in fairyland, or of a cathedral not built with hands but brought into existence by a miracle.

I began to think it not safe to stay in that place too long lest it should compel me to stay there always or cause me to feel dissatisfied and homesick when away.

But the interior of itself would never have won me, as I had not expected to be won by any building made by man; and from the inside I would pass out only to find a fresh charm in that part where Nature had come more to man's aid.

Walking on the cathedral green one morning, glancing from time to time at the vast building and its various delicate shades of colour, I asked myself why I kept my eyes as if on purpose away from it most of the time, now on the trees, then on the turf, and again on some one walking there—why, in fact, I allowed myself only an occasional glance at the object I was there solely to look at. I knew well enough, but had never put it into plain words for my own satisfaction.

We are all pretty familiar from experience with the limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone. If we attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a moment ago.

There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is the same, though in a less degree, with the more important sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look, merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again, with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we receive the "nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of the wideness of the field and the number and variety of objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an interval of rest.

Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I began to pay attention to the movements of a man who was manifestly there with the same object as myself—to look at the cathedral. I had seen him there for quite half an hour, and now began to be amused at the emphatic manner in which he displayed his interest in the building. He walked up and down the entire length and would then back away a distance of a hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then slowly approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when quite near the wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed aloft, the back of his head almost resting on his back between his shoulders. His hat somehow kept on his head, but his attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs who, to give an idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object, say that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off. The Americans, when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different expression; they said that to look up at so tall a thing caused the tobacco juice to run down your throat.

His appearance when I approached him interested me too. His skin was the color of old brown leather and he had a big arched nose, clear light blue very shrewd eyes, and a big fringe or hedge of ragged white beard under his chin; and he was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown tweeds, evidently home-made. When I spoke to him, saying something about the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch. It was, he said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen and he had never seen anything made by man to equal it in beauty. He had come, he told me, straight from his home and birthplace, a small village in the north of Scotland, shut out from the world by great hills where the heather grew knee-deep. He had never been in England before, and had come directly to Salisbury on a visit to a relation.

"Well," I said, "now you have looked at it outside come in with me and see the interior."

But he refused: it was enough for one day to see the outside of such a building: he wanted no more just then. To-morrow would be soon enough to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath and he would go and worship there.

"Are you an Anglican?" I asked.

He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village. They had two Churches—the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.

"And what," said I, "will your minister say to your going to worship in a cathedral? We have all denominations here in Salisbury, and you will perhaps find a Presbyterian place to worship in."

"Now it's strange your saying that!" he returned, with a dry little laugh. "I've just had a letter from him the morning and he writes on this varra subject. 'Let me advise you,' he tells me in the letter, 'to attend the service in Salisbury Cathedral. Nae doot,' he says, 'there are many things in it you'll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps, and I'd like ye to go.'"

I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an ordination service, very long, complicated, and, I should imagine, exceedingly difficult to follow by a wild Presbyterian from the hills. He probably disapproved of most of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day. His method was better than that of an American (from Indiana, he told me) I met the following day at the hotel. He gave two hours and a half, including attendance at the morning service, to the cathedral, inside and out, then rushed off for an hour at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a hired bicycle. I advised him to take another day—I did not want to frighten him by saying a week—and he replied that that would make him miss Winchester. After cycling back from Stonehenge he would catch a train to Winchester and get there in time to have some minutes in the cathedral before the doors closed. He was due in London next morning. He had already missed Durham Cathedral in the north through getting interested in and wasting too much time over some place when he was going there. Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!