the Walls; nobody but a few children ever came there; we had our own favorite bastion, our own view across the harbor; we carried home handfuls of the wild flowers. If one of the two Walls looked out over the harbor, the other looked out over the Solent and Spithead. The second Wall was not so beautiful in my eyes as the first. It began at a place which even a boy would not but recognize as squalid and horrible. Very near there stood a church of great interest, though of repellent appearance--I know not why it was repellent to look at, but it was. Between the church and the Wall lay a broad piece of consecrated ground. More than once have I been reminded what this ground was used for. More than once have I stood upon the Wall and looked down upon a funeral; the coffin, borne by six soldiers, was covered with the union-jack for a pall--could one have a better? behind, marched, with guns reversed, a small company of soldiers; in front went the muffled drums and the fifes. 'Twas the burial-place, you see, of the private soldier. When the service was over, the soldiers stood over the grave and fired their last farewell to their poor dead comrade; then the drummers took off their muffling and they fell in, and the fifes struck up a merry tune and so away back to barracks. Poor lad! Who was he? No one knew; no one cared. In those days no one, I believe, ever sent a message to his people that he was dead. On the outside, where the moat and slopes afforded a fine place for practice, the young drummers and the young buglers were practising all day long. I never hear a bugle-call, to this day, without being reminded of morning upon Portsmouth Walls. At the other end of this Wall were two or three very fine bastions, armed with larger cannon and with bombs which looked out on Spithead, where the fleets assembled before they put to sea. From Spithead sailed those great fleets, the Baltic and the Black Sea fleets, at the beginning of the Crimean war. A very splendid sight it was. The Queen led the way in her yacht. Then followed the Admiral, old Charley Napier; then came the gallant line-of-battle ships, each in place. To look at a ship of the modern type and to think of that magnificent fleet reminds one of the Israelites when they wept at the opening of the second Temple, to think of the perished glories of the first!