Mary's Abbey rise like fragments
of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and
the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday
and the babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading
novels.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S ABBEY]
The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of
antiquities, which is richer in Roman remains than any that one
sees outside of Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and
perfect, taken from the villas which people are always digging up
in the neighborhood of York, and, from the graves uncovered in
the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for civilians,
and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the Sixth Legion; the
slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties and left
to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the
universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest
Christians at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the
inmates of the tombs must have been. Some of the monuments bear
inscriptions from loving wives and husbands to the partners they
have lost, and some of the stone coffins are those of children.
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