The town, I said, had little beauty in its streets. There was a George the Second church, which had a spaciousness and a dignity of its own. There was another which had neither dignity nor space. There were no public buildings to speak of. But there were the Walls. The Walls! Oh, the Walls! These are all levelled and pulled down now. Nobody knows why they were levelled, but they were; and with them disappeared the beauty and the glory of the town. They were not ancient stone Walls, but earthworks in the style approved about the year 1780. I append a section of the Wall as I remember it. An open space, A B, separated it from the building of the town. A slope, B C, brought one to a broad road, C D, for the carriage and passage of cannon, ammunition, etc. At D, another low slope, about three feet high, to a narrow standing-place, D E, in front of which ran E F, a breast-work. The defenders were to fire, thus protected, across F F. F G was the slope to a level lower than that of A B on the other side. At H H was a narrow moat, but the intention of the builders of the Wall was to let in the water so as to cover up the whole of the valley G H; at H the ground sloped up; at many places the ground beyond H was also protected by an earth-work. The Wall ran in lengths protected by bastions; these bastions were mounted with cannon. At intervals there were stone gates with stone lookout-places, most mysterious. The town was divided into two parts, a Wall ran round each. No one would believe what a lovely place for a boy was the Wall--either Wall--to walk upon, or sit upon, or linger, and look, and listen, and dream upon. If you wanted a quiet place for reading you could sit protected from cold wind on a cannon-wheel; if you wanted to dream you could lean over a certain angle on the Queen's Bastion--was it the Queen's?--and there below stretched out the whole extent of the harbor, a broad lagoon at high tide, four miles from north to south and six from west to east; at the head of the harbor, Porchester Castle stood out, gray and frowning over the clear water that lapped her water-gate. This was a Roman fort; the outer Walls--the Roman work--still stand, and will continue to stand for many centuries; within there are the ruins of a Norman castle, the lofty design still uninjured; in another corner is a long and narrow Saxon church--a fine thing, this, for a boy to gaze upon. But that was not all. The space in front of the Wall was laid out in grass; in spring these meadows were full of buttercups; in the summer the grass all over the Walls, the parapet, the slopes, the sloping up of the Wall, the spaces on the bastions between the cannons, were filled with clover, daisies, buttercups, wild convolvulus, colored grasses--everything. There were also trees--"to catch the shells," we used to say; they were planted all along the Walls, and made a sweet and delightful walk in summer-time. And it was so quiet all day long upon