THE NEEDLES.

With the terminating western cliffs of the chalk-hills of the Isle of Wight beyond High Down we will close this pleasant journey. The far-famed Needles are a row of wedge-like masses of hard chalk running out to sea in the direction of the axis of the range of hills. They do not now much resemble their name, but in earlier years there was among them a conspicuous pinnacle, a veritable needle, one hundred and twenty feet in height, that fell in 1764. At present the new lighthouse, built at the seaward end of the outermost cliff, is the nearest approach to a needle. The headland behind them is crowned by a fort several hundred feet above the sea. There were originally five of these pyramidal rocks, but the waves are continually producing changes in their form, and now but three of them stand prominently out of the water.

And now our task is done. The American visitor landing at Liverpool has been conducted through England, and has been shown many of its more prominent attractions, but not by any means all of them, for that would be an impossible task. But he has been shown enough to demonstrate the claim of the mother-country to the continued interest of the Anglo-Saxon race from beyond the sea; and to this pleasant panorama and description there cannot be given a better termination than at the lovely Isle of Wight, the perfection of English scenery and climate, whereof Drayton has written,

"Of all the southern isles, she holds the highest place,
And evermore hath been the great'st in Britain's grace;
Not one of all her nymphs her sovereign favoreth thus,
Embracèd in the arms of old Oceanus."

THE NEEDLES.


INDEX.

THE END.