At nine o’clock next morning there is a rap at the door of my room.  The door being opened a man-servant is discovered, who touches his forehead (having no hat to touch) and says, “The ladies would like to ’ave you breakfast with them, sir.”

He is so very respectful in his manner of saying this that he is inaudible, and being asked what he said, repeats the touching his forehead and then repeats his words.

There are no muffins at breakfast—­a fact which I record merely because this is the first time since we have been in England that this peculiarly English dish has been omitted at breakfast.  It appears on inquiry that muffins are a luxury of large towns.  In villages they are rarely obtainable at less than about a week’s notice.  In fact, you can’t get anything to eat, of any sort, without pretty liberal notice.

After breakfast we go to see the old abbey.  It is an imposing and well-preserved pile.  It was founded by Ethelwold, a thane—­one of those righting, praying, thieving old rascals who lived in the tenth century, and made things lively for any one who went past their houses with money on his person.  When Ethelwold had stolen an unusually large sum one day, he 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.