Page:The Bible of Amiens.djvu/185

Rh the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high. Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door, (and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there,—it is none of your business whether they should be there or not, nor whether they deserve to have the sou,—be sure only that you yourself deserve to have it to give; and give it prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers). Then, being once inside, take what first sensation and general glimpse of it pleases you—promising the custode to come back to see it properly; (only then mind you keep the promise), and in this first quarter of an hour, seeing only what fancy bid you—but at least, as I said, the apse from mid-nave, and all the traverses of the building, from its centre. Then you will know, when you go outside again, what the architect was working for, and what his buttresses and traceries mean. For the outside of a French cathedral, except for its sculpture, is always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which you find how the threads go that produce the inside or right-side pattern. And if you have no wonder in you for that choir and its encompassing circlet of