stopped at a little cottage this morning, half smothered with roses, geraniums, &c., and, on the pretext of looking at a baby, made good my entrance. The little bit of an apartment, not more than six feet by ten, was as neat as possible. Not an article of its scanty furniture looked as if it had been bought by this generation; everything appeared cared for, and well preserved; so unlike corresponding dwellings with us. The woman had nine children; six at home, and all tidily dressed. I have not seen in England a slovenly-looking person. Even the three or four beggars who stealthily asked charity of us at Portsmouth were neatly dressed.

I greeted, en passant, a woman sitting at her cottage window. She told me she paid for half of a little tenement and a bit of a garden, ten pounds (fifty dollars) rent. And when I congratulated her on the pleasant country, "Ah," she said, "we can't live on a pleasant country!" I have not addressed one of these people who has not complained of poverty, said something of the difficulty of getting work, of the struggling for bread, which is the condition of existence among the lower classes here. Strange sounds these to our ears!

I was amused to-day with something that marked the diversity of the condition from ours in another way. I accosted a little girl who stood at a cottagegate. She was as well dressed as S.'s girls, or any of our well-to-do-in-the-world people. Among other impertinent questions I asked "Who lives here?" "Mrs. So-and-so and Mrs. So-and-so." "Only two

ladies!" I exclaimed, conforming my phrase to the taste of our cottage-dames. "They ben't ladies," she replied. "Indeed! what are they?"

"They

be's womans." Would such a disclaimer have been put in from one end of the United States to the other, unless in the shanty of adopted citizens?

I will spare you all the particulars of my wayside acquaintance with a sturdy little woman whom I met coming out of a farmyard, staggering under a load of dry furze, as much as could be piled on a wheelbarrow. A boy not more than five years old was awaiting her at the gate, with a compact little parcel in his arms snugly done up. "Now take she," he said, extending it to the mother, and I found the parcel was a baby not a month old; so I offered to carry it, and did for a quarter of a mile, while the mother, in return, told me the whole story of her courtship, marriage, and maternity, with the last incident in her domestic annals, the acquisition of a baking of meal, some barm, and the loan of her husband's mother's oven, and, lastly, of the gift of the furze to heat the oven. The woman seemed something more than contented-happy. I could not but congratulate her. "It does not signify," I said, "being poor when one is so healthy and so merry as you appear." "Ah, that's natural to me," she replied; "my mother had red cheeks in her coffin !" Happy are those who have that "natural to them," that princes, and fine ladies, and half the world are sighing for and running after.

THE last part of our drive to Fresh-water Bay was through a highly-cultivated district; the country had lost its romantic charm; to the very seashore on both sides of us it was covered with barley, pease, and the finest of wheat. Save a glimpse of the sea in the distance, the bold headland of Black Gang Chine, and the downs before us, it was as tame as a cosset lamb. And, by-the-way, speaking of lambs and such fancy articles, immense flocks of sheep are grazing on these downs, and each is as big as three of our Merinos, and the mutton is delicious.

FRESH-WATER BAY.

We are at an inn within a few yards of the beach, with a shore of chalky cliffs, and a pretty arch in the rocks worn by the water, and a jutting point before us called the Stag, from a fanciful resemblance, as I conjecture, to that animal boldly leaping into the waves. The Halls are here, and in a stroll with them last evening over the cliffs we encountered a man who lives," not by gathering samphire" (which, by-the-way, we did gather), but by getting the eggs of seafowl that resort here in immense flocks, flattering themselves, no doubt, in their bliss of ignorance, that the cliffs are inaccessible.* Our egg

* They are of very difficult access, as we were assured by seeing the process of letting the man down and sustaining him on the perpendicular cliff; but nothing seems impossible to men who must die or struggle for their bread. The man was stout and very well looking, but with an anxious and sad expression. I found he had a large

hunter had been successful, and had a sack of eggs hanging before him. He pays two guineas a year to the lord of the manor for the privilege of getting them, and sells them, he says, " to people in a decline." One lady, he told us, had paid him a shilling apiece. "She," replied Captain H., with a lurking smile," must have been far gone in a decline, I think." The man told us they had the art of emptying the eggshell by perforating it with two pinholes, and blowing out the contents; whereupon the captain, who leaves nothing unessayed, amid his children's merry shouts and ours, fairly rivalled the professor at his own art.

Sunday.-WE have been to church for the first time in England. It was an old Gothic edifice. I thought of our forefathers with tenderness and with reverence. Brave men they were to leave these venerable sanctuaries, to go over the ocean-to "the depth of the desert's gloom."

It was a curious coincidence enough, that the first preacher we hear this side the water bears our own name. This it was, no doubt, that set my mind to running upon relationships and forefathers. Mr. S. is a poor curate, who, after twenty years' service, is compelled to leave his place here by the new order of things, which obliges his superior to do his own

family to feed, and among them four stalwart boys. I asked him what were their prospects. "None," he said, with an expression suited to the words, "but starvation."

work. One feels a little distrustful of those reforms that destroy individual happiness and snap asunder old ties.

Monday. We drove this morning to Carisbrooke Castle, an old ruin in the heart of the island. We were shown the window through which Charles I., when imprisoned here, attempted to escape. In spite of getting my first historical impressions from Hume, that lover of kings and supreme lover of the Stuarts, I never had much sympathy with this king of bad faith; still it is not easy to stand at this window without a sorrowful sympathy with Charles. There he stood, looking on the land that seemed to him his inheritance by a Divine charter, longing for the wings of the birds that were singing round this window, to bear him to those friends who were awaiting him, and, instead of him, had only the signal which he hung out of this window to give them notice of the defeat of his project.

Nothing, I know, is more tiresome than the description of old castles which you get from such raw tourists as we are, and may find in every guidebook; but I wish I could do up my sensations and send them to you. As we passed the Elizabethan gate, and wound away up into the old keep, stopping, now and then, to look through the openings. left for the exercise of the cross-bow, or as we wandered about the walls, and stood to hear the peb