Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/19

16 Hall, Mrs H., and some of their friends had left cards for us. "Very prompt," we thought; "and so this matter is done."

We ate with Dalgetty appetites our first English dinner: soup, salmon, mutton-chops, and everything the best of its land, and served as in a private gentleman's house, and, alas! with an elegance and accuracy found in few gentlemen's houses in our country. We have plenty of gentlemen, but gentlemen's servants are with us rare birds.

June 5. We feel green and bewildered, as you may imagine; and not knowing how to arrange our tour around the Isle of Wight, we were discussing it in some perplexity when Captain Hall and Mrs. H. were announced. They were just going off on a visit to the son of Wilberforce who is rector at Brixton; but Captain H. deciding at once that we must give the day to the Portsmouth lions, and that be would show them to us, deferred his departure till the evening; and the half hour before we set off was occupied in receiving a visit from Captain H.'s children and instructions from a friend of Mrs. Hall, well acquainted with the localities, as to our progress around the island. Captain H. left us no time for dawdling. He has been a lion-hunter, and understands the art of lion-showing, and, what I think rather the nicest part of the art, what not to show. Off we set towards the sally-port On the way we dropped into a Gothic church (a pretty episode enough) of the twelfth century. Captain H. pointed out a monument to