founded the monastery and stocked it with nuns. It
was but a wooden shanty at first, but after having served till it was
worm-eaten and rotting with age, it was torn down and a fine stone
convent was built.

We walk about in that part of the abbey which is free from pews--by
far the larger part--and stare at the monumental stones let into the
floor and walls. If we did not know that Romsey had been the home
of Palmerston, we should learn it now, for these stones are thickly
covered with the legends of virtue in his family--wives, sisters, sons
and so forth, whose remains lie "in the vault beneath." After perusing
these numerous testimonials to the truly wonderful virtues of an
aristocracy whom we are permitted to survive, and after dropping some
shillings in the charity-box, which rather startle us by the noise
they make, we pass out of the cool abbey into the hot churchyard, and
read on a lonely stone which stands in a corner by the gate that
here lies the dust of Mary Ann Brown, "for thirty-five years faithful
servant to Mr. Appleford." Mary Ann no doubt had other virtues, but
they are not recorded: this is sufficient for a servant.

An hour's ride on the velvet cushions of a railway carriage brings us,
with our Paultons friends, the Boyce boys, to Southampton, which was
an old town when King Canute was young. We take rooms at a pretentious
marble hotel with a mansard roof, attached to the station--a railroad
hotel, in fact, but strikingly unlike that institution as we know it
in America. Wide halls, solid stone staircases, gorgeous coffee-room,
black-coated waiters, and the inevitable buxom landlady with a
regiment of blooming daughters for assistants--one presiding over the
accounts, another officiating at the beer-pumps, a third to answer
questions, and all very much under the influence of their back hair
and other charms of person. One of them alleviates the monotony of the
office duties by working at embroidery in bright worsteds.

Strolling out, Bunker and I consult certain shabby worthies who are
yawning on the boxes of a long line of wretched hacks drawn up by the
sidewalk across the street, and find that we can charter a vehicle for
two shillings an hour. These cabbies have more nearly the air of our
own noble hackmen than any we have seen in England. Americans are no
novelty to them, for ship-loads of American tourists are put off here
at frequent intervals, and the cabbies have a thin imitation of
the v