A Holy Island Pilgrimage

I.

No one could wish to insinuate a doubt that the rest cure has been a fortunate inspiration of modern medicine. In giving exhausted nerves and worn-out brains a temporary oblivion, mercy and wisdom have met together. Equally wise in their day and generation are the religious bodies that offer the occasional week’s retreat as a calmative to the fever of living. Without intervals of solitude and silence a soul must go clothed in rags and tatters, and prayer is undeniably an attitude of mind proper now and then to all humankind. Nevertheless, beside seeking the waters of Lethe in a hospital or casting one’s self into the sheltering arms of a cloister, there are, happily, other ways to be found of fulfilling a nineteenth-century wish to fly away and be for a time at rest. Best among these is the discovering of Nature at her most interesting; and if to the discovery can be added remoteness, and infinitely attractive associations as well, the combination must leave but little for the heart to desire. Such a place, where to pleasure of the eye there is joined generous fare for the imagination, is Lindisfarne, now known as Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland.

There are two ways of reaching Holy Island. One of the two preserves the full flavor of antique custom and local peculiarity, and ought not to be impracticable for the traveler who is keen about entering into the spirit of things ; the other, besides being eminently practicable, is by no means lacking in the individuality that is the breath of life to a journey. The former was undoubtedly St. Aidan’s mode of traveling, when, somewhat more than twelve hundred years ago, he went to take possession of his rocky diocese in the sea. It is quite as certainly the way in which the Saxon monks again and again fled before the harrying Danes to the mainland, and as often returned to the island, piously carrying with them the miracle-working relics of holy St. Cuthbert, their patron. It is still a way — as a traveler’s own eye - witness may easily assure him — much in vogue with men and women of the district who wish to reach the island without aid of cart, horse, or boat, and needs no more elaborate preparation than taking off shoes and stockings and making them into a compact parcel. Nothing then remains but to set forth courageously on one’s bare soles across the three miles of yellow sand that separate Holy Island from the shore. It does not matter if the foot-passenger starts out on his way alone ; his chances of company before he is halfway over the widespread shining flat are of the best. Tonsured and cowled figures may at any moment appear to pass and repass him. In the salt wind that blows invigoratingly in his face visionary coarse cassocks will be blown back from visionary emaciated limbs. It is ten to one he will catch some strain of church music on the air, or hear, wafted from the goal whither he, like any other votary of the cockleshell and staff, is bound, some sound of the chant of monks at matins or vespers.

The second way of getting one’s self transported to the island — from Beal, the nearest railway station — has not the merit of so much directness. Its necessary preliminary is a letter addressed to the postmaster on the island. The postmaster’s answer once received, however, the rest may with perfect assurance be left to time and him. He will engage quarters for the traveler, and will meet him — possibly by proxy in the person of his son — on the arrival of the appointed day and train ; though far should it be from any one acquainted with the fitful ways of English local trains to predict the precise hour at which the arrival of the latter is to be expected to take place. Two appreciable advantages (the others belong among the dross of utilitarian considerations) belong to the method of conveyance provided by the postmaster. If the day be fine (otherwise there is nothing to do but importune St. Aidan, St. Cuthbert, and all the saints of Lindisfarne for an unstinted measure of endurance, practically fortified by mackintoshes), — if the day be fine and the wind blowing freshly in from the sea, the seats in the cart are just high enough to let its occupants see one of the prettiest sights the sands have to show. All along their distant verge, where the surface of the water is still invisible, white-capped waves leap up at intervals, spouting their foam far into the air. These snowy wave-crests dance up and down like things possessed of life. For a moment they will be suspended like wild, frail fountains between earth and sky, and then vanish, as if a magician controlled their coming and going. Their strange beauty contributes to the sense of weirdness that presently begins to creep with a light chill through joint and marrow.

The carrier’s conversation, which is obviously the second advantage belonging to a place in his cart, does nothing to lessen this on the whole rather agreeable chill. It is the most natural thing in the world that his talk should turn upon the dangers of the route ; upon accident, hair-breadth escape from the tide, or fatal catastrophe. It was in consequence of an accident that the ominous square black boxes marking the passenger’s route across the sands were set up on poles, above tide-water, and at a distance of several hundred feet apart.

“ Refuges ” they are significantly named. A traveler surprised by the incoming of the tide may, if he be within reach of one, climb the rudely built steps leading up to it, and there remain safe and dry until the fall of the water makes it safe for him to continue his journey. But what an eternity, to any one imprisoned there, the interval of waiting might seem ![ Noah’s forty days and forty nights would be as nothing compared with it. The dull green waves would come creeping up near, and still more dangerously near, to the rough floor of that unbuoy tint ark. The salt brine would be dashed in a man’s pallid face, and he could taste the spray on his lips dry with terror. At every fresh shock of the sea pouring in from both sides the poles beneath the refuge would shiver; gulls, with their harsh wild cry, would go pitilessly wheeling overhead. Danger there might be none, yet surely of the sensations that follow in danger’s wake a goodly proportion would be felt. Finally, with the subsiding tide would come the sense of relief, the cheerful return of confidence. All this and more there is ample time for the traveler to imagine in detail while the wheels of the cart slowly and toilsomely revolve over the heavy road, coming at last in sight of the treeless fields and into the single road on the island.

The inn, in front of which the stout roan cob finally brings up with his load, is named, with the most infelicitous association, the Iron Rails. The artless secret of this inept nomenclature will be discovered by the visitor before he leaves. It is enough for him at first to find that the name of the inn is tbe only incongruous fact in the whole situation. Everything else about it preserves the eternal fitness of things in a degree that leaves nothing to be desired. To the left of the front door is the hospitable, roomy kitchen. Sometimes the sound of jovial voices, and sometimes an enticing smell of toasting cheese, issues from its open door. Around the fireplace are drawn high-backed wooden settles, tall enough and long enough to inclose the space of a cosy room. This is an ingle-nook, such as may still he seen once in a while, though now too seldom, in quiet corners of England. One may he sure that the fire is in an open grate, with perhaps an oven built at the side. No close-hearted iron range could ever invite conviviality around itself in this fashion ; the hearthstone of a stove is dead to the finer sentiments of good fellowship. At this friendly fireside the two active daughters of the house preside. It is they — hired service being unknown at the Iron Rails — who also serve the guest in his sittingroom across the ball from the kitchen, to the right of the entrance. In this homely, comfortable room there are wide seats in the windows, cupboards in the walls, pieces of furniture of an age that is a guarantee of family respectability, and chairs to which a person must adapt his spinal column as best he may; they at least harbor no indulgent notion of meeting an occupant halfway.

The installment here, where one must, from the nature of the transportation, arrive light of luggage, need not detain one long. In any case, it could hardly do so after the view of what lies outside has once been seen from the windows. In the distance is the open sea, and nearer at hand the landlocked harbor. Only some rough fields, covered with coarse grass, are to be crossed in order to find one’s self upon the pretty white beach that curves around the harbor. It is a fine harbor, large, and safe from all seawinds ; and it is strongly guarded on the north by the Castle, a picturesque, rude fortification which caps a rocky ridge jutting into tbe sea. Notwithstanding its advantages, the harbor is not populous with shipping. The roadstead, in fact, lies empty, and only some of the fishermen’s small craft float in the shallow water of the inner haven. A number of these same boats are also drawn up high and dry on the shingle. Late in the afternoon, when the sun is going down over the land, to the west, the fishermen gather in knots about the upturned black hulls, leaning their elbows upon them, and gossiping in slow, low voices that the visitor would give a good deal to be allowed to overbear. Although their lips move, their eyes seldom waver from that fixed, fascinated gaze towards the horizon which seems to be the seafaring man’s favorite occupation even when on land. The interest of the sea will not relax its hold upon these idlers for ever so short a space of time ; they continue to peer into its illimitable distance as if even at the moment life and safety were depending on something that might rise, no larger than a man’s hand, above the sky-line. But no stranger in their midst could wish them a jot otherwise than as they are, in their dark blue jackets, with the reddish light falling on their bronzed, weather - beaten faces. They make the focal points of light and color in a scene which, peaceful as it may be at times, can evidently put on its grimmer aspect at the bidding of storm or weather.

Those sapphire spots to the south, in the offing, are other islands. At this distance they look like mere fragments of rock,— natural derelicts which the treacherous sea has thrown up here as a snare to navigation, although when seen, as now, through a luminous haze, they are things of beauty to the eye as well. It must not be forgotten, however, that this is Old World ground, where every cubit of rock may be expected to have its human history. These bleak islets have theirs, ancient and modern both. They are the famous Farne Islands, to the largest of which, the inner Farne, or Fame par excellence, St. Cuthbert finally retired when he found the odor of his sanctity threatened by too close contact with the world on Holy Island. Here he breathed his last in March, A. D. 687. though his body was destined to the long wanderings which ended in the altar tomb in Durham Cathedral. Here, also, is the lighthouse in which Grace Darling lived, and from which she went to the rescue of the passengers and crew of tlie Forfarshire steamer, wrecked just within reach from the Fame.

Grace Darling’s grave and monument are in Bamborough churchyard, and the little house in which she died is in the village street, where it is known to all men by the inscription over the door. And that is Bamborough Castle, yonder, — that lovely, illuminated architectural vision that overhangs the water on the tall promontory to the south, westward from the Farnes. Whatever restoration may have done — and it is much — towards destroying the mediæval picturesqueness of Bamborough, it is not discoverable at the distance of Holy Island beach. As it stands in unapproached solitude and vastness, midway between radiant sea and radiant sky, itself as luminously bright as either in the sunset, this traditional stronghold of King Ida fulfills every requirement of romantic beauty. In all Northumberland there is no other site that equals it in impregnability. As a fastness, it must have presented a reassuring sight even in the rude era when St. Aidan arrived from Iona as Christian missionary to the heathen subjects of King Oswald. In that dim year of grace, 635, the Castle bore its uncontracted name of Bebbanburh, still recalling the Queen Bebbe in whose honor her husband, Ida, had named it a hundred years before. No better outpost to a church militant could have been found than this residence of the famous Oswild, who was at once warrior and saint. From Lindisfarne, or the retreat by the brook Hindis, as St. Aidan named the wild island lie selected for the centre of his see, signals of distress or need could easily have been seen at the peninsular Bebbanburh. It was probably over that very same pathway of shining water that the proselytizing saint passed to and fro on his visits of consultation with his royal patron, the interpreter to the Saxons of bis Scottish dialect. The saint’s Celtic views on the keeping of Easter were, no doubt, heterodox, and deserving of rejection in favor of the Latin rule, at the famous Synod of Whitby ; but controversy in regard to his eye for the advantages of situation is something that can never arise among those who have once seen the seaward prospect from Holy Island.

Nevertheless, even in Lindisfarne the imagination is not allowed to enjoy undisturbed the serenity of one catholic and apostolic sway. It is probable that the very first summer evening he spends there may bring the visitor face to face with dissent, in the shape of an open-air meeting that is being held by the nonconformist minister and his congregation in the village square. A fisherman, in his blue knitted jacket, plays the melodeon which has been placed just before the base of the market cross. His thick fingers move clumsily over the keyboard as he laboriously picks out the tune of a chapel hymn. At his side stands the minister, in long black coat and broadbrimmed black felt hat. As the notes of the melodeon cease, the minister reads from his hymn-book the words of a single verse of a hymn, of which the tune is presently raised by another sunburned fisherman who stands close at the minister’s hand. The men, women, and children, who are grouped around in a circle, join in singing the verse ; then, da capo, with the next verse, until the hymn is finished. Afterwards stillness falls upon the assembly, while the minister prays, with uncovered head, in earnest, simple words. A short address follows the prayer, perhaps by some other minister who is present, perhaps by a woman preacher, who reasons in persuasive words about righteousness and the judgment to come. Finally, after another hymn has been sung, the people noiselessly disperse, in the gathering darkness, to their homes. All the while the parish church has stood unresponsive in the background, its windows unlighted, its doors unopened. Presumably there are many souls on the island whose needs the Church’s ritual has not been able to meet. Yet it is difficult not to formulate a wish that these five hundred simple islanders might have been left as one flock, parishioners with an undivided form of worship.

II.

These are some of the approaches to the ecclesiastical heart and centre of Holy Island. Pleasant as they are, however, they are no more than sanctuary courtyards, or porches, the ambulatory chapels that skirt the high altar itself. The visit to this most sacred part of the island is best undertaken by morning light; fresh limbs, and, above all, elastic time being needed to explore the remains of the priory of Lindisfarne. It is not merely the visible and palpable that one has to do with here, but the invisible and impalpable as well. The boundaries of the priory are not limited by hard-andfast laws of space ; the rude gateway and fence that form its inclosure suffice to sequestrate the visitor as thoroughly as if walls of granite shut him off from the ordinary earth outside. The ghostly brotherhood who occupy it measure their tenure of possession by centuries, not by the brief span of the village tenantry round about them. Underneath the surface of the soil where the ruins of the priory church now stand lie the ashes of the earlier churches, and mingled with them is the consecrated dust of St. Aidan, and of those of his brethren and successors whose piety or rank entitled them to the same hallowed lying within the walls of the church. St. Aidan s mother church was rebuilt by St. Finan, second bishop of Lindisfarne, in the same primitive fashion, partly of stones, but chiefly of planks, mud, and dried reeds or bentz from the links. Three times was this Saxon church burned to the ground by the Danes, and as many times rebuilt by the persistent saints. The stone coffin of St. Cuthbert. sixth bishop of Lindisfarne, rested undisturbed for a matter of two centuries or so at the right of the altar, and meanwhile his historian, the Venerable Bede, wrote all the pretty stories of his life and miracles. Then came the great incursion of the Danes, when the monks, under the sixteenth and last bishop, Eardulph, fled from the island, leaving it for two hundred years to solitude and desolation.

Those massive fragments of an architecture from which, even in ruin, the voice of ecclesiastical pride still speaks are not the work of the earlier epoch, nor even of canonized hands. The day of greater glory on the island was not the day of greater building. The externally humbler early churches were entitled to the name and dignity of cathedral, as being the seat of a bishop. The stately remains of to-day are the ruins of a building of no higher rank than priory church. The priory was founded by some Benedictine monks sent to take possession of the deserted sanctuary “ in the vill of Holy Island ” by Bishop Carileph of Durham. Thus it happens that the masonry of surviving column and arch is Norman, and that such fragments of Saxon work as the island can boast were already part and parcel of a reverend past when the Benedictine colony began their building in the year 1093. Their church, naturally, was not one of the first magnitude, but so far as means and the smaller scale would permit they modeled it after the cathedral church at Durham. Some of the fine features that Durham still preserves magnificently intact may here be seen in ruin and in reduction. Although now mere broken stumps on the south side, or stately torsos on the north, the columns that once supported the nave of the priory were reproductions of the superb twin rows of Durham. How solid, worn as they are with time and weather, is their vast rotundity even yet, and what feats of resistance overcome are attested by those huge blocks of the red stone of which they are built! It was an unerring decorative instinct that engraved, by long monotonous labor, the spirals and zigzags that covered their surfaces. Rude as the Norman Romanesque ornamentation is, it has a richness that is lacking in the more delicate Gothic that succeeded it. The lavishness of hand that covered the circumference of giant columns with rude carving conveys a sensuousness of artistic impression that even the infinite variety of later periods does not often attain.

No better means could be devised for contrasting the effects of preservation and ruin in architecture than to come directly from Durham hither. At Durham the power and strength of the creative hand are still defiant of time ; here, what time has done to deform human inspiration nature has gone far in making amends for. The long vistas of the ribbed and cross-ribbed stone vaults of the cathedral cannot outdo in poetry of effect the unfathomable blue vault that spans the ruin. The mystical dim light of the one is no more subduing to the sense than is the loveliness of contrasted sunshine and shadow of the other; nor is the antiquity of dust-covered carving more eloquent in meaning than the freshness of the wallflowers and grasses that clothe the crumbling walls and arches with life. At Holy Island, of the roof of the tower that once joined nave with choir, and north and south transept with both, one curious transverse arch alone remains. That this arch should still throw its slender span diagonally from north to south summit of the fragment of tower yet standing is one of the freaks of survival whereby picturesqueness is secured to decay. The arch, with its supports, is but the thin skeleton, the airy ghost, of the once strong quadrilateral Norman tower, and, ghostlike, it makes itself felt as a thing independent of time and space, speaking with a voice that divides spirit from sense. In the moonlight and silence of midnight its weirdness curdles the blood; in the daylight it is the lofty perch of birds that sing as cheerfully as when it was new.

A step beyond the arch and one stands in the choir. The large east window is of much later date than the nave, but the light from the untraceried opening falls upon the selfsame rood of earth on which the primitive saints of Lindisfarne must have stood when they ministered at their office of the mass. Those rudely agglomerated portions of stone which may be seen at the base of the more smoothly joined and finished masonry are, it is claimed, the work of Saxon builders, the last visible relic of the edifice of our forefathers. An antiquarian of meddlesome intellect might possibly be able to prove that they are nothing of the kind, But with antiquarian curiosity one should, on this spot of all others, have nothing to do. Credulity is here, if never again, the cue of even the most skeptical. Plenary indulgence for all lapses from the duty of independent examination must be taken for granted here, where acquiescence in the sentiment of the place is for the nonce the first of spiritual necessities. Otherwise the delightful sense of overstepping the boundaries of centuries would be lost; no chronological miracle would be performed in the mind ; no apostle of Northumbria would pronounce his pax vobiscum, in the quickened ear of a belated disciple.

The successors to the early fathers, the Norman Benedictines from Durham, have no natural power like theirs of drawing the hearts of all times to themselves. They are invested with no winning saintship, and the gift of involuntary proselytism is not theirs. One prefers, in fact, to approach them on a decidedly less intimate personal footing. Their priors were doubtless men with many quarterings on their family shields, and the blood of conquerors ran in their veins, but they have bequeathed no individual names to love and memory. The ruins of their priory buildings are their true and only monuments. These are not to be likened to Furness or to Fountain’s in extent or in preservation. Not much more than the ground-plan of the once-imposing domestic architecture is to be traced here. But the foundations and what else remains have lately been laid bare from accumulations of earth and fallen stone, and the old custodian of the place can point out the arrangements of kitchen, storehouse, and cellar, and of the circular turrets by means of which the warlike monks fortified their monastery. Here and there one comes across some still remaining portions of finer stonework, — a few feet of arcaded wall, the columned joints of a doorway, a capital that once upheld a groined arch. They are the material out of which one may mentally reconstruct, or visualize, chapter-house, dormitory, or refectory, and they also keep up the interchange of artistic amenities that inevitably goes on between crumbling architecture and ornamenting nature. Long-stemmed bluebells spring from their crevices, and tufts of feathery grass soften all their harsh outlines.

The churchyard is the western boundary of the monastery. It has been tenanted by secular bones for centuries past. Nevertheless, there is the vicar’s word for it that the soil has a reputation for sanctity that spreads far and wide. In proof of this there is to be seen a grave — that of an elderly lady — whose occupant left directions only a decade or so ago to have her mortal remains brought here for safekeeping until such time as they might again be needed. She is at least awaiting that time in godly company. In the churchyard are the base and socket of the once famous St. Cuthbert’s cross. Durham, years ago, reached out her long arm and took the cross itself into her custody ; allowing it, however, in due course of time, to be accidentally destroyed. The people of the island have adopted the fragmentary remains in the churchyard into their familiar life, and have rebaptized them, in the name of local tradition, a pelting stone.” Over this pelting stone a new-made bride must jump when she comes out of the church. If she clears it, local superstition declares all is well. If she fails, the event is presumably as her own good temper and the bridegroom’s ordain it shall be.

The parish church, gray and severe in exterior, seems at first sight an intruder in the graveyard. The latter is the proper appanage of the priory, an integral part of the ghostly diocese of St. Cuthbert, patron saint to the Norman foundation. The parish church, on the contrary, is dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin, and has a paltry antiquity that begins only in the year 1120. Still, notwithstanding the comparison by which it suffers, it can claim an atmosphere and an interesting individuality of its own. Like many another obscure parish church in the kingdom, it has the fascination of having grown by accretion, and of proving, as an oak does by the number of its rings, the age of its various parts by the cutting of moulding, string-course, or capital, by the depth of a volute or the stilting of a base. But it does not give up its secrets without effort on the part of the visitor. Though much may still be read in the stone in autograph, just as the workman’s chisel left it after the last stroke, the meaning of much more has been obscured by repair; Holy Island church, like others, having had to run its chances at the hand of the restorer, partly to its benefit and partly to its archæological detriment. One record of the spirit of mediæval times is left in the form of a slant opening piercing the north wall, through which, if the eye is put close enough, a view may be had of the space just in front of the altar. This, probably, was the "lepers’ squint,” by means of which these unfortunates were enabled to see, from the outside of the church, the elevation of the host during the celebration of the mass.

The vicar is the custodian ex officio of the most venerable and most precious archæological relic that the island can boast. This is a Saxon headstone, six by eight inches large, inscribed with a cross and with letters which stand to the uninstructed eye for an epitaph. The vicar has made the church porch the repository of this interesting monument, which is hung upon the wall to the left of the doorway, and is covered with glass as a protection from desecrating fingers. He takes pride in pointing out that the British Museum would be glad to obtain possession of it. The still more valuable Lindisfarne Gospels have already found their way into that omnivorous institution, so that a visit to the British Museum is, in any case, apart of the complete tour of Holy Island. Nevertheless, the visitor will sympathize with the vicar’s satisfaction in keeping the companion relic among its natural surroundings. He is not an antiquarian himself, but a parish priest in the best sense of the word. He is practically his own parish clerk beside, and is choirmaster as well to his choir of girls ; his reason for having the chants and anthems sung by girls alone being an indisputable one : the voices of the men and boys, he finds, are so rough that by no effort of training can music be extracted from them. Therefore it has in all likelihood happened that ere now a choir of girls has been installed in the newly refitted chancel of the ancient church of Holy Island. The Sunday toggery of the girls not promising to be seemly in this new position, the vicar has doubtless also carried out his further intention of putting them into caps and surplices.

Beside the vicar’s testimony to some of the delightfully humorous and human idiosyncrasies of his parishioners, the church holds an illustration of one of them. There stands in a dark corner, by the Vestry door, a long wooden object, slatted and lifted on four feet from the ground, with poles like those of a sedan-chair projecting from the corners. This is a bier. It was to have been the parish bier, having been built to that end by the last incumbent of the church. Those, however, for whose use it was intended would have none of it. A bier was not to their taste. Since the memory of man they had gone to their last home on the arms of bearers ; and so, by the help of Heaven and their own determination, they still do and still will continue to do. Hence it is that the bier stands unused in an unused corner of the church, a lasting witness to the sagacity of the islanders in deciding for themselves when to let well enough alone.

There remains, after the church, one more shrine to visit in honor of St. Cuthbert. This last stage should be made, if possible, by evening light. Then, if the tide will serve, one may follow the footsteps of this inveterate and incurable mitred hermit, across rough boulders and kelpy stones, to the tiny outlying island that once afforded him solitude and a cell, though too perilously near to humankind to supply the impregnable envelope he wished for his sanctity. The walking to the island is treacherous, as slippery tangles of seaweed conceal the pools of salt water which the tide has left between the stones, and precipitate unwary feet into them, but the constant accompaniment of the crackling of the pods of the seaweed is pleasant to the ear. It does not take long to explore the outward and visible remains on the island. The foundations of a cell and oratory are still distinctly traceable, and on a plinth of what was once a doorway a bit of carved moulding is significant of the love for comeliness that survived even a desire, for the world. This and the extreme smallness of dimensions of the saint’s former quarters are the two accentuated impressions the rough island is likely to produce. Around its rocky and tumbled base may be picked up the small fluted fossils which scientists profane by the harsh term “ encrinal.” The vicar’s children know better, however, and call them St. Cuthbert’s beads.

The Castle, with its long corridors and upper and lower batteries (the whole garrisoned by a single soldier, his wife and infant), may also be seen to advantage in the twilight. After a view from its summit of the darkening face of lonely land and water, the little inn seems more friendly than ever on one’s return to it. As far as the fine old brass knocker on the front door is concerned, all thoughts of acquiring it in exchange for fair coin of the realm may as well be abandoned. The daughter of the house intimates that she has been approached on this score before. She will, however, in return for nothing more than the question explain how the house has taken its name of Iron Rails from the pair of small railings that flank the sides of the stone doorstep. Think of the temptations to grandiloquence of name here ; remember how such temptations would be embraced in another hemisphere, and then admire the modesty and self-restraint that have been satisfied to emphasize this small circumstance ! That there should be a background of sadness to the kindliness of these people is not surprising. Poverty keeps close company with most of the inhabitants of the island. Pure water is perhaps the one necessity of life they have in plenty, and to see this carried into the houses, from the several common wells or springs, in buckets suspended by a wooden yoke from the shoulders of the drawers, is one of the pretty sights of the place.

When, finally, the pilgrim is forced reluctantly to turn his back upon the attractions of Holy Island, and his face once again towards the railway, it is to be hoped, in the interest of the serenity of mind he is to take with him, that he will not be seduced by the confidence of Mr. Thomas Bell and his son into crossing just before high tide. With a “ nip “ tide, father and son protest, the crossing may be safely accomplished even at high water. But it is best to be warned by the vicar’s wife, the innkeeper ’s wife, the wife of Mr. Thomas Bell himself, and by the combined feminine wisdom of the island, and to go while there is yet time and to spare of low water. Otherwise, although he may come off unscathed, a horrible tremor of the nerves may be the last sensation a traveler will take with him from his pilgrimage.

Eugenia Skelding.