In an ancient south country city with a great past behind it, and nothing whatever in front of it, there exist cheek by jowl a vast Norman cathedral and a small Catholic church. The church, oddly enough, is of the eighteenth century, and it is not known how the St. Lull Catholics of that era found the means to build it, still less what spirit of effrontery prompted them to rear it so close to their lost cathedral. There it is, off a bye-street of Georgian hou'ses and spiked garden-walls, its whereabouts indicated by a furtive notice at the incidence of an alley. Pursue this alley in the spirit of faith, and you come abruptly up to a dwarfish stucco building submerged in the morning shadow of the cathedral, its graveyard, planted with classical trees of the family of the willow in a mourning ring, terminated by the west transept of the fane itself.

The stucco interior is anything but architecturally impressive, and so damp that flourishing outcrops of fungus uproot the tiles in untrodden parts of the floor. But there is a clear fairway to the altar, and a frequented one. You seldom find Our Lord without one or two kneeling adorers if you look in at any time between sunrise and” sunset, and I have looked in myself at all hours of the day. I have a liking for the church, apart from my ardour for its Lord; and my liking extends to the quiet graveyard in its rear.

I was winding up a summer holiday in St. Lull: staying on at my rooms there, after my children had gone back to their convents, to meet an American friend before returning to my husband in Italy. It was the first week in October, and the friend, a greyhaired priest on leave for literary work, had come down to visit the cathedral and me.