The modern aspect of Southampton’s streets is that of the bustle and activity of a midland town, and the narrow pavements of Below and Above Bar have that metropolitan air which a crowd of well-dressed people intent on business or pleasure gives to the better class provincial city.  It would seem that the inevitable accompaniment of such prosperity is the meanness of poorly-built and squalidly-kept suburbs.  When the superb situation of Southampton is considered one can but hope that some day, in the new England that we are told is on the way, a great transformation will take place on the shores of Itchen and Test.

The excursion that every visitor should take is down the Water to Cowes.  Few steamer trips in the south are as pleasant and interesting.  In consequence of the double tides with which Southampton is favoured, the chance of having a long stretch of ill looking and worse smelling mud flats in the foreground of the view is almost negligible.  Unless a very thorough knowledge of the shore is desired, the view from the deck will give the stranger an adequate idea of the surrounding country.  The passing show of shipping, of all sorts, sizes and nationalities, is not the least interesting item of the passage.  The writer’s most vivid recollection of Southampton Water in the early summer of 1918 is not of the beautiful shores shimmering in the June sun, but of an extraordinary line of “dazzle ships” in the centre of the waterway, moored bow to stern in a long perspective, or it would be more correct to say, want of perspective, the brain and the eye being so much at variance that the ends of the line could scarcely be believed to consist of ships at all.

[Illustration:  NETLEY RUINS.]

The ruins of Netley Abbey can best be seen by taking the pleasant shore road from Woolston and Weston Grove.  The distance is a little over two miles from the Itchen ferry.  The so-called Netley Castle was once the gate-house of the Abbey, converted into a fort when Henry VIII devised the elaborate scheme of coast defence that has dotted the southern seaboard with a more scattered (and more picturesque) series of Martello towers.

The ruins of the Cistercian Church which once graced this shore and raised above the trees its lighthouse tower, a seamark by day and a beacon by night, are among the loveliest in Wessex.  Though perhaps these relics of a former splendour, when they consist of more than a few bits of broken masonry, should rather be said to be heartrending in their reminder of what we have lost.

Not so beautiful is the great pile, a mile to the south, built during the Crimean war for the invalid warriors and named after their Queen.  A short distance away is another great building, or series of structures, erected during the Great War, to further our claim to the empire of the air.

[Illustration:  ON THE HAMBLE.]