died, while his face would still look, as it does now, toward his tomb. [Illustration: THE GOWER STATUE] A constant stream of American visitors pours annually through the Red Horse. Within three days of July, 1889, more than a hundred American names appeared in the register. The spirit of Washington Irving is mighty yet. Looking through a few of the old registers of this house, I read many familiar names of distinguished Americans. Bayard Taylor came here on July 23, 1856; James E. Murdoch, the famous Hamlet and Mirabel of other days, on August 31, 1856; Rev. Francis Vinton on June 10, 1857; Henry Ward Beecher on June 22, 1862; Elihu Burritt, "the learned blacksmith," on September 19, 1865; George Ripley on May 12, 1866. Poor Artemas Ward arrived on September 18, 1866,--only a little while before his death, which occurred in March, 1867, at Southampton. The Rev. Charles T. Brooks, translator of _Faust_, registered his name here on September 20, 1866. Charles Dudley Warner came on May 6, 1868; Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Florence on May 29, 1868; and S. R. Gifford and Jervis M'Entee on the same day. The poet Longfellow, accompanied by Thomas Appleton, arrived on June 23, 1868. Those Red Horse registers contain a unique and remarkable collection of autographs. Within a few pages, I observed the curiously contrasted signatures of Cardinal Wiseman, Sam Cowell, the Duc d'Aumale, Tom Thumb, Miss Burdett-Coutts (1861), Blanchard Jerrold, Edmund Yates, Charles Fechter, Andrew Carnegie, David Gray (of Buffalo), the Duchess of Coburg, Moses H. Grinnell, Lord Leigh, of Stoneleigh Abbey, J. M. Bellew, Samuel Longfellow, Charles and Henry Webb (the Dromios), Edna Dean Proctor, Gerald Massey, Clarence A. Seward, Frederick Maccabe, M. D. Conway, the Prince of Condé, and John L. Toole. That this repository of autographs is appreciated may be inferred from the fact that special vigilance has to be exercised to prevent the hotel registers from being carried off or mutilated. The volume containing the signature of Washington Irving was stolen years ago and it has been vaguely heard of as being in America.