

Transcribed from the 1893 Gay and Bird edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                           A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP


                                    BY
                           KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

                         WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
                           BY CLIFFORD CARLETON

                           LONDON: GAY AND BIRD
                         5 CHANDOS STREET STRAND
                                   1893

                          _All rights reserved_

                         First Edition June 1893.
                        Second Edition July 1893.
                      Third Edition September 1893.
                      Fourth Edition November 1893.
                       Fifth Edition October 1894.

                           TO MY BOSTON FRIEND
                                 SALEMINA
                           NO ANGLOMANIAC, BUT
                              A TRUE BRITON




                                   SHE


                                                WINCHESTER, _May_ 28, 1891
                                                     The Royal Garden Inn.

We are doing the English cathedral towns, aunt Celia and I.  Aunt Celia
has an intense desire to improve my mind.  Papa told her, when we were
leaving Cedarhurst, that he wouldn't for the world have it too much
improved, and aunt Celia remarked that, so far as she could judge, there
was no immediate danger; with which exchange of hostilities they parted.

We are traveling under the yoke of an iron itinerary, warranted neither
to bend nor break.  It was made out by a young High Church curate in New
York, and if it had been blessed by all the bishops and popes it could
not be more sacred to aunt Celia.  She is awfully High Church, and I
believe she thinks this tour of the cathedrals will give me a taste for
ritual and bring me into the true fold.  I have been hearing dear old Dr.
Kyle a great deal lately, and aunt Celia says that he is the most
dangerous Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards
Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, she was engaged to a young architect.  He, with
his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an imaginary
scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest, an unmapped
territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal there, on
