A mile from Carisbrooke village lies Newport, the modern capital of the island—modern in its relation to Carisbrooke, but possessing some traces that it was formerly of Roman occupation also. It is pleasantly situated in a gentle valley, the temperature mild and damp like that of Devonshire, but is chiefly interesting to visitors for the attractions of the lovely region round about—stately Carisbrooke; Osborne, the royal manor of Her Majesty, and not far from thence the birthplace of Dr. Arnold; Godshill, a hamlet so beautiful one would like to wave over it an enchanter's wand that should fix for ever just the charm one sees in it to-day. The name of the village is accounted for by a tradition that is not uncommon. The builders of the church proposed to erect it at the foot of the hill, but each morning found the previous day's work undone and the materials carried to the top. After some days' perseverance they gave up the contest, and set up their beacon of the faith on the spot indicated by their invisible combatants.

Not far from Newport, by a way filled with delight, one reaches Shorwell, a little village beautifully placed, and with a curious old church full of interest. Upon one of the walls is an old fresco illustrating the life and adventures of St. Christopher, and there is a quaint memorial brass erected by Barnabas Leigh in honor of his two deceased wives, and with a flattering allusion to wife No. 3, then living! One wife is followed by a troop of children—the other is forlornly alone. There is also a memorial to Sir John Leigh and his grandson Barnabas, who died seven days after the grand-sire:

Inmate in grave he took his grandchild heire,
Whose soul did haste to make to him repaire;
And so to heaven along, as little page,
With him did poast to wait upon his age;

and to Lady Elizabeth Leigh—"Sixteene a maide, and fiftie yeares a wife."

In the opposite direction from Newport lies Arreton, where Legh Richmond found the heroine of a narrative we have all read—The Dairyman's Daughter. Her memorial is in the churchyard, which is unusually full of interesting inscriptions. Here is an early English one from a brass, dated 1430, within the church:

Here is yburied vnder this graue
Harry Hawles his soul God saue
Longe tyme steward of ye yle of Wyght
Have mercy on hym God ful of myght.

Legh Richmond was curate of two near-by villages, Brading and Yaverland, during the first years of the present century. Both villages are very old and full of interesting antiquities—churches, Jacobean manor- and farm-houses, parish stocks, a bull-ring where our enlightened forefathers amused themselves savagely as well as sadly.

The excursion to Freshwater, twenty-two miles from Ventnor, is sufficiently charming when made on top of a coach in the veiled yet warm friendliness of an English summer day; but the way of ways to make it, as indeed to see the whole island, is as a pedestrian. Freshwater is at the extreme western point of the island. In going thither from Ventnor one traverses all the western portion of the Undercliff, where every glimpse is a joy; then emerges into a wilder, solitary region, with a bold coast-line sharply indented with chines whose scenery varies from beautiful to savage and drear; finds always the little hamlets—this with its church, that with its inn, become a classic resort, another with its story of an old hermitage or tradition of gold-laden galleon foundered on its cruel rocks, the gold coins still now and then to be found in certain sands. Here a landslip has exposed the remains of a Romano-British pottery; there is a down with Pictish tumuli, and at long intervals one of the old farm-houses which it is impossible not to grudge to its possessor. The landscape has none of the exuberant luxuriance and variety of the Undercliff. Bare, lofty downs, shadeless fields, no coppices, great swampy pastures—an open, breezy country all swells and falls, with occasionally fine clumps and avenues of English elms, feathered to their roots. And so, at last, Freshwater, where downs are noblest, and the air, blown straight across the Atlantic, seems not less bracing and exhilarating than that of New England.

The old village of Freshwater is picturesque, but the new lodging-house portion, only lately sprung up because it has become a fashion with doctors to prescribe Freshwater as a holiday and sanitary place, is hideous in its newness of fiery red brick and freshly uptorn earth.

But it was not for Freshwater, old or new; not for its church, which has some very fine bits, and an epitaph celebrating "the most virtuous Mrs. Anne Toppe, in her widowhood, by a memorable providence, preserved out of the flames of the Irish rebellion;" not for the really superb character of the coast-cliffs, just here mined into caverns only accessible from the sea, with huge detached masses of chalk, one hollowed into a grand arch, through which the waters rush with magnificent music; not for "the Needles," the extreme western points of the middle range of downs, isolated masses of rock that are very fine seen from seaward, entering "the Race" between the Isle of Wight and Dorset; not for Alum Bay, whose gay sands we have all seen fantastically arranged in landscapes under glass, and whose cliffs have their vertical strata in brilliant stripes of deep, purplish-red, blue, yellow, gray that is almost white, and jet black, and contrast delightfully with the snowy sides of "the Needles;"—not for any or all the sublimity of sea and shore, did I make the pilgrimage to this out-of-the-way island corner. I went, as most lovers of our English tongue in its strength and poetry will go, because here for years was Tennyson's home—the home wherein most of his poems have been written—Farringford,