The Severn is now changing from a river to an estuary. No places of importance lie near the riverside, and its scenery is becoming marshy and monotonous; but some distance away to the east is Berkeley, an old town with an old castle, memorable for the murder of the hapless Edward; and on the other side is Lydney, a quaint little town with a small inland harbour, a market cross, and a fine old church. In the adjacent park, on a kind of elevated terrace overlooking the valley, are the remains of a group of Roman villas, from which many coins, pieces of pottery, and other relics have been unearthed. At Sharpness, above Lydney, a railway crosses the Severn by a long bridge of twenty-eight arches, a magnificent work; but below it ferryboats were the only communication from shore to shore till in 1886 the completion of the Severn Tunnel linked Bristol and the West more closely to the eastern part of South Wales. At this point the river is more than two and a quarter miles across; but the tunnel itself is about double that length. This, the greatest work of its kind in Britain, was completed by the late Sir John Hawkshaw. The banks become yet farther apart, the water is salt, the tide ebbs and flows, as in the sea. The estuary, indeed, continues for many a mile, still retaining the form of a river-valley. Very probably there was a time when a Severn flowed along a broad valley, where now the Bristol Channel parts England from South Wales, to join another stream which had descended over land, now sunk beneath the Irish Sea, and the two rivers discharged their united waters into a more distant Atlantic Ocean; but that was very long ago, so that our task is now completed. We have followed the Severn from its source to its ending--till our brook has become a river, and our river has become a sea. /T. G. Bonney./ [Illustration: A BEND OF THE WYE.] THE WYE. "The Notorious Hill of Plinlimmon"--The Stronghold of Owen Glendower--Llangurig--Rhayader Gwy--Llyn-Gwyn--The Elan, the Ithon, and the Yrfon--Llandrindod--Builth--Aberedw and the Last Prince of Wales--Hay--Clifford Castle and the Fair Rosamond--Hereford--The Lug--"The Wonder"--Ross and John Kyrle--Goodrich Castle--Coldwell Rocks--Symond's Yat--Monmouth--The Monnow, the Dore, and the Honddu--Wordsworth's Great Ode--Tintern Abbey--The Wyndcliff--Chepstow--The Lower Reaches.