On Thursday, the 22d of July, we left Salisbury for Brighton, where we were to be guests at Arnold House, the residence of our kind host.  Here we passed another delightful week, with everything around us to contribute to our quiet comfort and happiness.  The most thoughtful of entertainers, a house filled with choice works of art, fine paintings, and wonderful pottery, pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the number, rest and peace in a magnificent city built for enjoyment,—­what more could we have asked to make our visit memorable?  Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate in the intervals of “the season.”  This was not the time of Brighton’s influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull.  The houses are very large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops are well supplied; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the noble esplanade is lively with promenaders and Bath chairs, some of them occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I suspect, employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk.  I took one myself, drawn by an old man, to see how I liked it, and found it very convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me drag him.

With the aid of the guide-book I could describe the wonders of the pavilion and the various changes which have come over the great watering-place.  The grand walks, the two piers, the aquarium, and all the great sights which are shown to strangers deserve full attention from the tourist who writes for other travellers, but none of these things seem to me so interesting as what we saw and heard in a little hamlet which has never, so far as I know, been vulgarized by sightseers.  We drove in an open carriage,—­Mr. and Mrs. Willett, A——­, and myself,—­into the country, which soon became bare, sparsely settled, a long succession of rounded hills and hollows.  These are the South Downs, from which comes the famous mutton known all over England, not unknown at the table of our Saturday Club and other well-spread boards.  After a drive of ten miles or more we arrived at a little “settlement,” as we Americans would call it, and drove up to the door of a modest parsonage, where dwells the shepherd of the South Down flock of Christian worshippers.  I hope that the good clergyman, if he ever happens to see what I am writing, will pardon me for making mention of his hidden retreat, which he himself speaks of as “one of the remoter nooks of the old country.”  Nothing I saw in England brought to my mind Goldsmith’s picture of “the man to all the country dear,” and his surroundings, like this visit.  The church dates, if I remember right, from the thirteenth century.  Some of its stones show marks, as it is thought, of having belonged to a Saxon edifice.  The massive leaden font is of a very great antiquity.  In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the sinner on the outside of the building.  The dead lie all around the church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries.  One epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth recording.  After giving the chief slumberer’s name the epitaph adds,—­