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These ribs spring from slender pillars between the windows and corbels heads on the other side: over the exterior of the windows are carved grotesque heads, of which we give some illustrations. The south walk of the cloisters is the more richly groined. At the south-east corner is a square turreted tower containing a small chamber, which has been carefully and completely restored.

The plan consists of a nave of ten bays, with aisles, and a western transept; transepts of four bays with eastern chapels, the south transept having also a groined chamber to the west, extending for its whole length; a choir of four bays, terminating in an apse, nearly semicircular, with aisles; and beyond the apse a large square-ended addition for more chapels, having a groined stone roof of fan tracery, now known as the New Building.

The piers are cross-shaped with a big semicircular shaft on each face, and a large roll-moulding on each angle which is continued up above the abacus to form an outer order for both the aisle and the main arches, for large arches are carried across the nave and aisles from north to south as if it had been intended to roof the church with an ordinary groined vault.

The roof springs from clustered columns, branching into an enriched groined ceiling, with a very large and embellished pendent key-stone in the centre, from which will be suspended the chandelier to light the whole of the interior.

The roof of San Xavier del Bac is a series of the most perfect groined domes, with the deep embrasures of the windows on each side colored shell tints in wave-lines. Because of the height and depth of the windows, the light is wonderfully clear and soft. The church is used now only by Indian children; and did Indian children ever have such a magnificent temple in which to worship?

SECTION LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and then follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a kind of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because, while we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our abbeys.

The third window in this aisle has escaped alteration in form; but Perpendicular tracery has been inserted. The eastern ends of both aisles were altered in Early English times. They have now a groined roof of one bay of that period, and very handsome double piscinas. The aumbry on the north side in the south choir aisle has been glazed, and is utilised as a cupboard to hold some curiosities.

The Gothic tracery of the arches that face the quadrangle unites the strength of stone with the delicacy of pencil drawing. In the late Gothic and Renaissance part, the ceilings are richly and floridly groined, angelic and other figures forming the termination of the low-reaching bosses, the groins converging in fan-like order towards elaborately-carved canopies against the wall.

Each of the chapters portrays conditions and circumstances leading up to the great climax the Second Coming and the immense and measureless consequences the millennial reign and the eternal state. The book is like the roof of a great cathedral, like the interior of the roof, groined and panelled each panel a chapter.

When we went in among the trees, the sumptuousness of the orchard was unlike anything I had ever seen; while the fragrance shaken from the gently waving boughs regaled our senses most delightfully. In many places the trees formed a dense shade, spreading overhead a dark, rustling vault, groined with boughs, and studded here and there with the ripened spheres, like gilded balls.