irregular architecture, wilful roads, and provoking impasses are at least in harmony with each other. Let us see how it strikes a stranger--Mr W. D. Howells, to wit--on a recent visit. The lovely little town, which is like an English water-colour, for the rich, soft blur of its greys and blues and greens, has a sea at its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a milky horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats drowning in it like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to have the liveliness of watering-place shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and laurel: some of the better-looking houses were thatched, perhaps to satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant. But this appreciative stranger is a little at sea in freely dashing into his sketch a background of “seats and parks of nobility and gentry,” which seems somewhat of an American exaggeration for the villaed skirts of Ventnor. The most lordly “seat” about Ventnor is Steephill Castle, at the west end, from the tower of which flaunts his own Stars and Stripes to proclaim it the home of a compatriot who must have reason to chuckle, as he does in a volume of memoirs, that slow, simple, honest John Bull now wakes up to let himself be exploited by Transatlantic enterprise. This gentleman’s daughter was the late popular novelist “John Oliver Hobbes,” who latterly lived much here, or in the neighbourhood. The modern castle, that has housed an empress in its time, took the place of a cottage of gentility built by Hans Stanley, George III.’s Governor of the Island. It formerly belonged to the Hamborough family, whose heir met with his death in a painful way, that gave rise to what was known as the Ardlamont murder case. The trustees of this family have lately been at loggerheads with the Ventnor people as to enclosing the links by the shore. Part of the cliff here, however, has been acquired as a prettily unconventional public park, laid out with playing greens beneath its leafy mazes and airy walks. At this end, opposite the west gate of the park, is the station of the mid-island line, distinguished as “Ventnor Town,” whereas “Ventnor” station of the older east coast rail stands so high above the sea that access to it suggests the “stations” of a pilgrimage. The last time I was in Ventnor, I had the pleasure of being able to assist some countrywomen of Mr Howell’s whom I found fluttering in breathless doubt between those two confusing goals, that ought to be joined by some kind of mountain railway.