it up and down, with specimens of the British soldier from the large garrison at Chatham; those trim and firmly-pacing red-coats who seem, to eyes accustomed to the promiscuous continental levies, so picked and disciplined, polished and pomatumed, such ornamental and yet after all, such capable warriors. The cathedral at Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and breaks that long vista so properly of the very essence of a great church. Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of steps to pass through the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I remember something in the way of a quiet, weird deanery or canonry, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come circling and clamoring around it. Better than these things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a most noble and imposing ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive than this towering square of Rochester.