we must confess that, for peaceful quietude, the beauty of the scenery without and the comforts to be found within, we give a preference to the "Swan" at Newby. The old mansion-like inn is familiar, if not indeed endeared, to everyone who has sojourned upon the green shores of wooded Windermere, and in the old coaching days, ere the shrill whistle of the locomotive had awoke the echoes in those peace-breathing valleys, it was as much in favour with the turtle doves and as much sought after by the votaries of Hymen as the "Low Wood" is at the present time. It stands on the banks of the Leven, near its outlet from the lake, and at the very foot of that bleak range of fir-clad melancholy hills that rise like a mountain barrier to guard the Lake country from the inroads of the treacherous sea. The clear river glides smoothly along by the front of the house, a quaint old bridge of five arches with queer little recesses on either side bestrides the stream, and, just below, its waters are dammed up by a weir, over which they fall in sheets of whitened foam, making a perpetual music that awakes the drowsy echoes of the vale. Simple are the details, but charming is the combination--the old bridge, grey and weather-worn and lichen-stained, the white front of the pleasant old hostelry repeating itself in the still clear waters of the Leven, the little patch of unpretentious garden with a trim pleasure-boat moored to its bank, and the clump of tall trees at the foot of the bridge that bend gracefully over the stream and now and then dip their pensile branches in the current, together make up as attractive a picture as the eye of an artist would wish to rest upon.