Harold's unlucky cause and surrendered to William the Conqueror, and the
last that fell in the no less unlucky cause of the Stuart king against the
Parliamentarians. In much earlier times it was held by the famous Twentieth
Legion, the _Valens Victrix_, as the key of the Roman dominion in the
north-west of Britain, and at present it has peculiarities of position, as
well as of architecture, which make it unique in England and a lodestone to
Americans. Curiously planted on the border of the newest and most bustling
manufacturing district in England, close to the coalfields of North Wales,
the mines of Lancashire, the quays of its sea-rival Liverpool and the mills
of grimy, wealthy Manchester, it still exercises, besides its artistic and
historic supremacy, a _bonâ fide_ ecclesiastical sway over most of these
new places. It is the first ancient city accessible to American travellers,
many of whom have given practical tokens of their affectionate remembrance
of it by largely subscribing to the fund for the restoration of the
cathedral, a work that has already cost some eighty thousand pounds.

[Illustration: CAER-GAI.]

The neighborhood of Chester is as suggestive of antiquity and foreigners as
the city itself. Volumes might be written about the quaint, Dutch-like
scenery of the low rich land reclaimed from the sea; the broad, sandy
estuary of the Dee, with the square-headed peninsula, the Wirrall, which
divides this quiet river from the noisy Mersey; the Hoylake, Parkgate and
Neston fisher-folk on the sandy shores, with their queer lives, monotonous
scratching-up of mussels and cockles, a never-failing trade, their terms of
praise--"the biggest scrat," for instance, "in all the island," being the
form of commendation for the woman who can with her rake at the end of a
long pole scratch up most shellfish in a given time; the low, fertile green
pastures, the creamy cheese and the eight yearly cheese-fairs. The city
itself is the most foreign-looking in all England, and the inhabitants have