Nowadays Southampton Water is, indeed, a busy, though silent, highway, for along it pass all kinds of craft from the wherry to the stately Atlantic liner; from the white-sailed racing cutters to the barges with red-brown canvas and a look of the Thames and Rochester about them, with dingy colliers and rust-red “tramps” as a foil to pleasure craft. Different nowadays, indeed, is the Water from what it was when frigates and seventy-fours spread their wide expanse of snowy canvas to catch the light north and north-westerly airs which came down from the Hampshire highlands, and when trading brigs and East Indiamen crept up with the flood. Hythe, but for an excess of mud which is the bugbear of most tidal estuaries, is as good a place off which to bring up as any seafarer could wish. In its sleepy narrow streets, quaint houses, and picturesque gardens lies a charm which is very grateful after a week or two on salt water. The townlet, which clings, as it were, to the outskirts of the New Forest, with its feet all the while in the water, is rightly enough beloved of artists, who, in the quaint old-time roofs and walls of its houses and cottages and its amphibious inhabitants, find types and inspiration. Here, in the flesh and in a garb which generally contains tacit concessions to the joint needs of shore life and sea life, one meets characters which might have stepped out of the pages of W. W. Jacobs’s _Sunwich Port_. Descendants of the men who half a century or so ago, at the darkling of the moon, made their way up the silent stretch of water, with boats loaded to the gunwales with contraband spirits, tea, and silks (after surreptitious visits to French luggers in the offing off Eaglehurst), and who, upon safe landing at dead of night, melted away with their packhorse trains into the solitudes and thickets of the New Forest. There still hangs a romantic flavour around old-world Hythe which places it in sharp contrast to its big, up-to-date, bustling neighbour across the water. From Hythe, too, one may push one’s way up to Redbridge, in gig or dinghy, and thence onward, through green, flower-decked meadows and past rush-grown pools, with a background of swelling, wooded uplands, to historic Romsey, with its abbey (founded in 907 by Edward the Elder), which saw the coming of the Norman conquerors and knew also what terror marked the inroads of the Danes. Southampton, the “Liverpool of the South,” whose now ruinous and picturesque walls once did such excellent service against the French pirates of long ago, and, indeed, probably saved, not alone the town, but also the county from being sacked and over-run with fire and sword, retains many historic memories in spite of the bustling spirit of modern commerce which now pervades it.