so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection
to their alien rule seemed essentially not only of
the same make as me, but the same civilization.
Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods
expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness
with ours, and called to a like irresponsive sky.
A hundred witnesses of their mortal state—jars
and vases and simple household utensils—fill
the shelves of the museum; but the most awful, the
most beautiful appeal of the past is in that mass
of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special
urn and uncovered for your supreme emotion. It
is equally conjectured to be the hair of a Roman lady
or of a British princess, but is of a young girl certainly,
dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which
it was found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable
unguent of the day, and kept in form by pins of jet.
One thinks of the little, slender hands that used
to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted
themselves in the silver mirror under the warm shadow
that the red-gold mass cast upon the white forehead.
This sanctuary of the past was the most interesting
place in that most interesting city of York, and the
day of our first visit a princess of New York sat
reading a book in the midst of it, waiting for the
rain to be over, which was waiting for her to come
out and then begin again. We knew her from having
seen her at the station in relation to some trunks
bearing her initials and those of her native city;
and she could be about the age of the York princess
or young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn
hard by.
There is in York a little, old, old church, whose
dear and reverend name I have almost forgotten, if
ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity Goodramgate,
which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster.
We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September
afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall,
Venetianly overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse,
and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in
stained glass. The custodian had surprised us
and the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into
the room where they were investigating the claims
of the registered voters to the suffrage; and so,
much entertained and instructed, we issued forth,
and, passing by the church in which Guy Fawkes was
baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly
upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another
is indeed its name.
It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy
space of its own, with a wall hardly overlooked on
one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial homes
of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the
air of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and
Decorated Gothic, with a square, high-shouldered tower,
as it bulks up to a very humble height from the turf
to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl
sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored
