On the whole, it is not an impressive interior; but, at any
rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came
to England,--the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and
kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because
it is so old, and of the past.
On one side of the altar there was a small square chapel,--or what had
once been a chapel, separated from the chancel by a partition about a
man's height, if I remember aright. Our guide led us into it, and
observed that some years ago the pavement had been taken up in this spot,
for burial purposes; but it was found that it had already been used in
that way, and that the corpses had been buried upright. Inquiring
further, I found that it was the Clapham family, and another that was
called Morley, that were so buried; and then it occurred to me that this
was the vault Wordsworth refers to in one of his poems,--the burial-place
of the Claphams and Mauleverers, whose skeletons, for aught I know, were
even then standing upright under our feet. It is but a narrow place,
perhaps a square of ten feet. We saw little or nothing else that was
memorable, unless it were the signature of Queen Adelaide in a visitors'
book.
On our way back to Skipton it rained and hailed, but the sun again shone
out before we arrived. We took the train for Leeds at half past ten, and
arrived there in the afternoon, passing the ruined Abbey of Kirkstall on
our way.
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