where I insist on believing that only virtue and happiness are ever tenants.  Even outside the sacred enclosure there is a great deal to enjoy, in the ancient town of Salisbury.  One may rest under the Poultry Cross, where twenty or thirty generations have rested before him.  One may purchase his china at the well-furnished establishment of the tenant of a spacious apartment of ancient date,—­“the Halle of John Halle,” a fine private edifice built in the year 1470, restored and beautified in 1834; the emblazonment of the royal arms having been executed by the celebrated architectural artist Pugin.  The old houses are numerous, and some of them eminently picturesque.

Salisbury was formerly very unhealthy, on account of the low, swampy nature of its grounds.  The Sanitary Reform, dating from about thirty years ago, had a great effect on the condition of the place.  Before the drainage the annual mortality was twenty-seven in the thousand; since the drainage twenty in the thousand, which is below that of Boston.  In the Close, which is a little Garden of Eden, with no serpent in it that I could hear of, the deaths were only fourteen in a thousand.  Happy little enclosure, where thieves cannot break through and steal, where Death himself hesitates to enter, and makes a visit only now and then at long intervals, lest the fortunate inhabitants should think they had already reached the Celestial City!

[Illustration:  Salisbury Cathedral.]

It must have been a pretty bitter quarrel that drove the tenants of the airy height of Old Sarum to remove to the marshy level of the present site of the cathedral and the town.  I wish we could have given more time to the ancient fortress and cathedral town.  This is one of the most interesting historic localities of Great Britain.  We looked from different points of view at the mounds and trenches which marked it as a strongly fortified position.  For many centuries it played an important part in the history of England.  At length, however, the jealousies of the laity and the clergy, a squabble like that of “town and gown,” but with graver underlying causes, broke up the harmony and practically ended the existence of the place except as a monument of the past.  It seems a pity that the headquarters of the Prince of Peace could not have managed to maintain tranquillity within its own borders.  But so it was; and the consequence followed that Old Sarum, with all its grand recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows,—­as much a tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh.  Old Sarum is now best remembered by its long-surviving privilege, as a borough, of sending two members to Parliament.  The farcical ceremony of electing two representatives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end to by the Reform Act of 1832.