We stopped at a post card shop just opposite the rear entrance to Farringford--a rustic gate opening into a narrow roadway between tall trees--and they told us that the ban on visitors was absolute. But one might see the house from the road. The unprecedented snow of the preceding winter had almost destroyed the tree so beloved of the poet--the "giant Ilex, keeping leaf When frosts are keen and days are brief," which hid the front of the house. Besides, the owner was now at Aldworth and the gardener might not be so averse to visitors--but we ignore the hint and content ourselves with a visit to Freshwater Church. Lady Tennyson is buried in the churchyard, her grave marked by a white marble cross. Inside there are tablets inscribed to the poet and his wife, who were regular attendants at the church, and a marble statue to the memory of Lionel, the son who died on shipboard in the Red Sea when returning from India. The village of Freshwater is full of picturesque cottages, and there are many more pretentious modern villas which indicate that the blight of a popular watering place threatens it. High on the hill, over the town and sea, towers the Tennyson memorial, a great Celtic cross, forty feet in height, reared by the poet's admirers in England and America. [Illustration: THE TENNYSON HOME, FRESHWATER, ISLE OF WIGHT.] There is little to see at Yarmouth, where we wait an hour or more for the boat. In the church is buried Admiral Holmes, the man who took the village of New Amsterdam from the Dutch and called it New York, and a marble statue, representing the great seaman standing by a cannon, commemorates this and other achievements. An English writer tells this curious story of the monument: "Even a poor judge of such things can see at a glance that this is no ordinary piece of work. It is said that the unfinished statue was intended to represent Louis XIV. and was being conveyed by the sculptor in a French ship to Paris in order that the artist might model the head from the living subject. Holmes captured the vessel and conceived the brilliant idea of compelling the artist to complete the work with his (the admiral's) likeness instead of that of le Grand Monarque. The old fellow seems to wear a grim smile as he thinks of the joke, but as the head is undoubtedly of inferior workmanship to the body, the artist may have felt that he had his revenge." The admiral was a native of Yarmouth and a part of his mansion is incorporated into the Pier Hotel. It still retains the old staircase and much antique paneling; and a tablet on the wall recites that Charles II. was a guest here in 1671 on a visit to Holmes.