habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the world."

What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little parley at the porter's lodge where they charge admittance and sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left. by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction, though not with

out the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed, that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Everything in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it: a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleasant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The machinethreshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.

When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick houses, each with its

little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hartford. The tram's course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holidaymakers strolled up and down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in everincreasing multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modern advance of Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses, standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease and splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a setting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.

We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest afternoon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plymouth; the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on first-class tickets that at any other time would have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were the more content, because, presently, we were running through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mastered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded

depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of-England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.