ne 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
to