nd the scenery was strictly English. Small enclosures, copses, a sward
clipped close as velvet, and trees (of no great size or beauty, however,)
scattered in the fields, with an effect nearly equal to landscape
gardening, were the predominant features. The drought had less influence
on the verdure here than in Dorsetshire. The road was narrow and winding,
the very _beau ideal_ of a highway; for, in this particular, the general
rule obtains that what is agreeable is the least useful. Thanks to the
practical good sense and perseverance of Mr. McAdam, not only the road in
question, but nearly all the roads of Great Britain have been made, within
the last five-and-twenty years, to resemble in appearance, but really to
exceed in solidity and strength, the roads one formerly saw in the grounds
of private gentlemen. These roads are almost flat, and when they have been
properly constructed, the wheel rolls over them as if passing along a bed
of iron. Apart from the levels, which, of course, are not so rigidly
observed, there is not, any very sensible difference between the draught
on a really good McAdamized road and on a railroad. We have a few roads in
America that are nearly as good as most one meets with, but we have
nothing that deserves to be termed a real imitation of the system of Mr.
McAdam.

The distance to Newport was only four or five miles. The town itself, a
borough, but otherwise of little note, lies in a very sweet vale, and is
neat but plain, resembling, in all but its greater appearance of
antiquity and the greater size of its churches, one of our own
provincial towns of the same size. A---- and myself took a fly, and
went, by a very rural road, to Carisbrooke, a distance of about a mile,
in quest of lodgings. Carisbrooke is a mere village, but the whole
valley in this part of the island is so highly cultivated, and so many
pretty cottages meet the eye--not cottages of the poor, but cottages of
the rich--that it has an air of finish and high cultivation that we are
accustomed to see only in the immediate vicinity of large towns, and not
always even there.

On reaching the hamlet of Carisbrooke we found ourselves immediately
beneath the castle. There was a fine old village church, one of those
picturesque rustic edifices which abound in England, a building that time
had warped and twisted in such a way as to leave few parallel lines, or
straight edges, or even regular angles, in any part of it. They told us,
a