One afternoon we saw a carriage stop at our entrance door, it held King Oscar of Sweden and his suite, who had come to take lunch at our hotel. After their meal the whole company withdrew to the lawn in front of our window. The Swedes threw themselves down on the grass, and the eldest member of the party, who was lying on his back in idle contentment, began to sing at the top of his voice a Swedish song with the burden of _O Matilde_, coming over and over again. Another Swede, forgetting his dignity, pirouetted and executed somersaults like a veritable clown, his legs making frequent excursions towards the sky, to the great indignation of one of the hotel tenants, a prudish maiden-lady of some fifty years, who was knitting in the garden. She rose suddenly, gathered up her work in dignified displeasure, and walked back to the hotel with an air of offended maidenhood, like a startled virgin whose virtue was being put to the test. King Oscar was travelling in strictly incognito under the name of _Count Haga_. When my husband asked our waiter, who had just brought in our tea, if the gentleman who sang _O Matilde_, was the King, he responded stoutly that it was not at all the King, but his first minister. Some time afterwards, during our stay in Paris, we saw the portrait of the Swedish King exposed in the window of a picture shop, and the fact appeared undeniable—that the singer was precisely King Oscar. In Shanklin, like everywhere else in England, Sunday is a dull day; the village is asleep, the shopkeepers put up their shutters and retire to the bosom of their families. Over the door of a thatched-roofed cottage just opposite Hollier’s Hotel, the sign-board Library in big white letters, is taken off and the mistress of the shop does not sweep the steps on her threshold, as she does every week-day. The baths, even, are open only until eight o’clock in the morning. There are very few people in the streets, only at eleven o’clock a.m., and at eight p.m. you can see the inhabitants with their prayer-books, going off to Chapel. We had quite enough of the Isle of Wight. Shanklin is such a dull and sleepy place! It has only one advantage, you can’t spend money there. The worst of the place is that there is nothing to do in the evenings; at nine o’clock all the houses close their shutters, and one can only go to bed. My pleasure-loving temperament revolted against this life, and I was very pleased when the day of our departure arrived. We went by train to Cowes, where we took the boat to Southampton. Before leaving British soil, we entered a druggist’s shop and bought some homeopathic medicine against sea-sickness, for each crossing makes me horribly ill.