Various forces and suggestions came into his life and swayed him for

longer and shorter periods.

He went to Canterbury and came under the influence of Gothic

architecture. There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the

Gothic; in the middle ages he would no doubt have sat upon a

scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too flattering

portraits of church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he

strolled, with his hands behind his back, along the cloisters behind

the cathedral, and looked at the rich grass plot in the centre, he had

the strangest sense of being at home--far more than he had ever been

at home before. "Portly capóns," he used to murmur to himself, under

the impression that he was naming a characteristic type of medieval

churchman.

He liked to sit in the nave during the service, and look through the

great gates at the candles and choristers, and listen to the

organ-sustained voices, but the transepts he never penetrated because

of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the

fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he

had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But some of the

smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious

urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He

wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived

in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cluster there so

The History of Mr Polly