The antique wood carving upon the seats and pews here, now blackened and hardened almost to ebony in appearance, is very fine, excellently executed, and well preserved. High above ran around the nuns' walk, with occasional openings, whence the meek-eyed sisterhood could hear service below without being seen themselves as they came from their quiet cloisters near at hand, a quadrangle of one hundred and ten feet square, in which were four covered walks looking upon the enclosed garden, now a neglected greensward, where several forgotten old abbots slumber peacefully beneath great stone slabs with obliterated inscriptions.
The curious grope into some of the old cells, and most of us go down under the building in the crypt, where the massive Gothic pillars, that support the pile, still in perfect preservation, bring vividly to mind those canvas representations of prison scenes one sees upon the stage.
Inside the cathedral were numerous very old monuments and mementos of the past; among others an immense tapestry wrought by nuns hundreds of years ago, and representing Elymas struck with blindness. The enormous size of these cathedrals strikes the "fresh" American tourist with wonder. Fancy churches five times as large as ours, and the height inside from sixty to one hundred feet from the stone floor to the arched ceiling, lighted with glorious great windows of stained glass, upon which the stories of the Bible are told in colored pictures, and south, east, west, transepts, nave, and choir, crowded with relics of the past, that you have read of in the story-books of youth, and again upon the pages of history in maturer years; artistic sculptures, old monuments, statues, carvings, and curious remains.
In the chapter-house connected with the cathedral, we were shown the colors carried by the Cheshire regiment on the field of Waterloo; and it was interesting for me to grasp with my sacrilegious American hand one of the colors borne by a British regiment in America during the war of the Revolution.
We also visited the ecclesiastical court-room in which the Bishop of Chester, in 1554, tried a Protestant minister, George Marsh, and sentenced him to be burned for heresy. The seats of the judges and chair of the accused are still preserved and shown to the visitor, who generally desires to sit in the martyr's seat, and finds it, even for a few minutes, an uncomfortable one.