IT may be that some of my readers are members of the Masonic body. Mr. John Proctor Carter, sometime Fellow of King's and Eton, in writing a history of the chapel, published in 1867, writes thus: "So many learned authors have been at fault when they have ventured into the obscurity which envelops the history of the Freemasons, by a gang of whom this chapel, in common with, at all events, a large number of mediaeval buildings were erected, that to say a word upon the subject may seem presumptuous. The theory of a traditional science, confined entirely to the members of a secret society that had ramified over the whole of civilised Europe, and to whom developments in architecture were due, has been pushed to extremity by some writers. By a natural reaction others have been led to discredit altogether the existence of such a society, and to consider the masonic fraternity merely as one of the various trade corporations or guilds whose relics have descended to our own day. But apart from the argument drawn from universal belief, there is probably sufficient evidence to show that the Freemasons were distinguished to some extent from other guilds, partly by the possession of peculiar secrets, and partly by their religious character. They seem to have been as it were the knight-errants of architecture, and to have travelled from city to city and country to country in the exercise of what they must have deemed a half sacred profession."