despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into a kind of naval academy. Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was--a great green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing cricket. I always like an English common: it may be curtailed and cockneyfied, as this one was--which had lamp-posts stuck about on its turf and a fresh-painted banister all around--but it is sure to be one of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich, and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a nursery of British valor. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon another common, where local color was still more intense. The scene was very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and the evening being beautiful it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk. There were half a dozen cricket-matches: the soldiers were playing against the lads in corduroys. At one end of this peaceful _campus martius_, which stretches over a hilltop, rises an interminable façade--one of the fronts of the artillery barracks. It has a very honorable air, and more windows and doors, I imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept places of ingress to officers' quarters. Everything that looks out upon it is military--the distinguished college (where the French prince imperial lately studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp--a collection of the tidiest plank huts--on the other; a hospital, on a well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in the town below there are a great many more military matters--barracks on an immense scale; a dock-yard that presents an interminable dead wall to the street; an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be "five miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame the most craven spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way to the