I had intended to follow the valley of the Meon right down to the sea, and by my map I find it would have taken me to Lichfield, but by some mischance at Wickham I got on the wrong road, a road that took me to Fareham, so the rest of the way I lost sight of the river. I was vexed with myself at having done this, for a river is always such cheerful company. No country, however tame, is without charm that has a river running through it; a river is, as a Frenchman said, "a moving road," its destiny the sea; the birds sing best by its banks, the cattle go down to and refresh themselves and wade in its waters, the fisherman haunts it, often picturesque old mills stand by its side; there is always life by a river, and the gleam of it enlivens the dullest of landscapes. I always make for a river, and follow it as far as I conveniently can. Those old monks knew a good thing, they could be trusted for that, and be it noted how generally they built their abbeys by the side of a stream. Some say it was because they might catch fish for their Fridays when they fasted, or feasted, on fish, for fish is not a bad dish, washed down by good wine--so their enemies say, in the days when the monks became lazy and fat, and let their lands instead of farming them, but I rather believe they selected such sites with an eye for fair spots, and that only. The road on to Fareham seemed tame and hardly worth travelling. After the quiet beauties of the valley above, I was spoilt for the ordinary. But at Fareham, an unattractive, long-streeted town, I again found a good inn of the old-fashioned sort, and that reconciled me to the place; then the inn had a little garden in its rear overlooking an inlet of the sea where ships were harboured, and the sight of their masts and their sails gave a sense of romance to the view, for the sight of a ship, however small it may be, sets my thoughts a-wandering and voyaging in imagination all the world over. The town was forgiven, indeed forgotten. If an inn you rest at has only a pleasant garden to moon in, what matters the town? If "the finest landscape is improved by a good hotel in the foreground," how much the more so in comparison is a commonplace town? I know an old country town that might have been pleasant enough in past days, but now has been ruined picturesquely and utterly by some rows of most assertively ugly new buildings of staring red brick and blue slates and plate-glass; but at the end of it stands a fine coaching inn, a long low building with creeper-clad walls, a dream of old times with its swinging signboard upheld on a post, its panelled, beam-ceilinged chambers, its cool, cosy bar, its long out-of-date comfortable Georgian furniture, not to mention its big bowling-green on which our ancestors played. In spite of its ugliness, and very ugly it is, to that town I often repair solely for the sake of that inn, not forgetting its worthy host, who might have stepped out of some novel by Dickens or Ainsworth or James.