From Great Malvern we went to Bath, another place where we could rest and be comfortable.  The Grand Pump-Room Hotel was a stately building, and the bath-rooms were far beyond anything I had ever seen of that kind.  The remains of the old Roman baths, which appear to have been very extensive, are partially exposed.  What surprises one all over the Old World is to see how deeply all the old civilizations contrive to get buried.  Everybody seems to have lived in the cellar.  It is hard to believe that the cellar floor was once the sun surface of the smiling earth.

I looked forward to seeing Bath with a curious kind of interest.  I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections.  She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise of decayed gentlewomen.  There, she told me, persons with very narrow incomes—­not demi-fortunes, but demi-quart-de-fortunes—­could find everything arranged to accommodate their modest incomes.  I saw the evidence of this everywhere.  So great was the delight I had in looking in at the shop-windows of the long street which seemed to be one of the chief thoroughfares that, after exploring it in its full extent by myself, I went for A——­, and led her down one side its whole length and up the other.  In these shops the precious old dears could buy everything they wanted in the most minute quantities.  Such tempting heaps of lumps of white sugar, only twopence!  Such delectable cakes, two for a penny!  Such seductive scraps of meat, which would make a breakfast nourishing as well as relishing, possibly even what called itself a dinner, blushing to see themselves labelled threepence or fourpence!  We did not know whether to smile or to drop a tear, as we contemplated these baits hung out to tempt the coins from the exiguous purses of ancient maidens, forlorn widows, withered annuitants, stranded humanity in every stage of shipwrecked penury.  I am reminded of Thackeray’s “Jack Spiggot.”  “And what are your pursuits, Jack? says I.  ’Sold out when the governor died.  Mother lives at Bath.  Go down there once a year for a week.  Dreadful slow.  Shilling whist.’” Mrs. Gaskell’s picture of “Cranford” is said to have been drawn from a village in Cheshire, but Bath must have a great deal in common with its “elegant economies.”  Do not make the mistake, however, of supposing that this splendid watering-place, sometimes spoken of as “the handsomest city in Britain,” is only a city of refuge for people that have seen better days.  Lord Macaulay speaks of it as “that beautiful city which charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio.”  If it is not quite so conspicuous as a fashionable resort as it was in the days of Beau Nash or of Christopher Anstey, it has never lost its