al is
partly self-supporting, partly dependent upon voluntary aid, and in all
the places of resort one sees the little alms-box with its eloquent
appeal, "For I was sick, and ye visited me not."

High up upon the hill above Ventnor is the seaside refuge of the London
city missionaries. The block of buildings was erected as a series of
model cottages for laborers. Whether these found their intended homes
too fine, too phalansterian, or what not, I cannot tell, but the group
of houses was made over to the tired workers in the London slums, and
the laborers perch upon all sorts of inaccessible places upon the down,
scratching great unsightly places in the chalk, erecting therein the
tiniest houses of red brick; and though the one or two windows may be
filled with flowers, the ugly gashes do not heal quickly high on the
wind-swept hill.

The longest, and certainly the most interesting, excursions to be made
from Ventnor are those to Carisbrooke and to Freshwater. The first leads
you into the very heart of the island, through lanes that must be the
boweriest in all England. Often the road-bed drops for a long way into a
deep cutting. Ivies cover all the sides, ferns, vetches, campions and
arums spring thickly amid them, and the tall, straggling hedges of
dog-roses, brambles and hawthorn that top the banks are luxuriantly
overrun with honeysuckle, filling the whole air with its spicy
fragrance. On either side are blossoming fields of clover and beans, the
larks are mounting and singing in ecstasy overhead, the road climbs a
steep ascent, and we have miles and miles of finished landscape in view.
There are timber-tied farm-houses here and there, or tiny hamlets whose
straw thatches are simply glorious with their patches of velvet moss and
the brilliant golden blossoms of a succulent whose name I do not
know--houses and hamlets one would like to seize in one's arms and drop
them down in America, in the midst of New England's hideous
factory-villages, ornamentless, shadeless, unrestful, glaring with
white-painted deal.

For the _interior_ of the old English cottages there is not one word of
defence to be uttered: the ugliest pine box of a house to be found
anywhere in all the unlovely New England towns is more comfortable, more
sanitary. The English cottage has a rheumatic floor of beaten earth or
tile; its rooms are few and small, and very dark; the water-supply is
scanty and most inconvenient; its chimney smokes; mice and r