LEAMINGTON,
where we arrived after an hour's ride, and remained over night, much enjoying our accommodation at the Avenue Hotel. Next morning, after breakfast, took a stroll out over the town. It is a noted place of aristocratic resort for pleasure, and for its springs—a sort of cross between English Bath and American Saratoga. Everywhere were facilities for the enjoyment of pleasure or health-seeking tourists. It would seem as though one could hardly be sick here. It was in this place that Sir Walter Scott wrote "Kenilworth," and as one breathes the exhilarating air, he is inclined to reduce the honors usually accorded to the great writer, and imagine that it is nothing strange that, with such surroundings, he wrote as he did. A visit to Leamington, and one is in the secret of Sir Walter's power when he wrote that smoothest of romances.
Perhaps we ought to make a more economical use of adjectives in describing the neatness of streets and the beauty of public and private grounds, for this is the universal and not exceptional condition.
The pink hawthorn is in bloom, and such pansies as we never saw at home. Remember, this is May 28. We have not anywhere in our travels seen Indian corn growing, and think it is not raised. We have seen no fields of potatoes, only small patches for family use; and these are six inches out of the ground. Carrots and early cabbages are fully grown and exposed for sale. We visited one grapery, where the Black Hamburg vines were forty years old and in good bearing, the grapes being about the size of peas. The vines were set in the borders of the greenhouse, which were two and a half feet wide, and the vines were three and a half feet apart,—the stocks, or trunks, being not more than an inch and a half in diameter. On the outside of a small conservatory was a fine heliotrope, one and a half inches in diameter, nine years old, which had often been well pruned and was in profuse bloom.
The town has a population of 22,730, and is very pleasantly situated on the River Leam, a tributary of the Avon, and is one of the handsomest towns in England, and more American in appearance than any other place we saw on our journey. The spring waters are saline, sulphurous, and chalybeate. They came into use in 1797, and are visited constantly by the élite of the land.