The ride is superb all the way to Beauvais. It is Easter Sunday, all the villages are rejoicing. Giddy-go-rounds are in full swing, and the Beauvais hotel is occupied by boys from Paris and their best girls, the latter are not above flirting even with an elderly gentleman like myself. The fact that _his_ arm is around her waist and _his_ head on her shoulder does not in the least interfere with her double actions,--she can squeeze _his_ hand while she throws languishing glances at me.
But dinner is over and the old town presents greater attraction to me than these passers-by within her limits. Darkness has come down upon the narrow streets, where, as I wander along, the lamps cast queer shadows under the eaves of the gabled houses. There is a mass of something over there that should be the cathedral, it towers so high into the sky and I pause before it in doubt. Part is Gothic and as the light will permit, I fancy very beautiful. The remainder is evidently a building of another century, certainly of a totally different style of architecture. While I am pondering, a foot-step draws nearer and nearer, the only sound of life in the city, and its owner, a little man, in answer to my question, assures me that this is not the Cathedral, but St. Étienne--a structure as old as the greater church which stands quite on the other side of the town, and "If Monsieur visits it, let him go at noon and ask for the old clock, it is well worth an inspection and very curious."
So he patters off into the silence of the night, and I wander on through street after street until the Cathedral looms up before me. Only a piece of a church, but what a piece, how gigantic! Why, since there would be few if any rivals on the earth, does not the nation complete it to its own glory? It may lose some of its majesty by daylight,--that often happens,--but to-night it is superbly solemn and most majestic, even though but a fragment.
These great religious temples are all in place here in old Europe, but I cannot but think that the erection of a vast cathedral for the Episcopal Church in America is money ill spent and but to gratify vanity. These structures were built when great temples were almost a necessity for the processions of the Church of Rome, but they are of little use, save the choir, for any other purpose even in that church of to-day and, aside from the Cathedral of Westminster in London, the Church of Rome has erected no such structures since that of Orleans.