amethyst, while the country further inland exhibited tints varying from the deepest olive—almost approaching black—through the richest greens, away to the most delicate of pearly greys in the remote distance. The Wight—about a quarter of a mile distant on our port hand—presented a picture of exquisite and almost fairy-like beauty, with its wooded slopes, waving cornfields, and grassy dells, aglow with the rich purply-golden haze of sunset, repeating their beauties in the waveless tide which washed its shores. As I stood gazing entranced upon the varied beauties of earth, sea, and sky, the scene gradually changed, a marvellous transformation was taking place, the sky tints deepened into a warmer, richer glow, the colours of the landscape slowly faded into sombre neutral, the castle stood out black as ebony against the dying flush in the sky, the water blushed crimson for a moment, then paled to a cold greyish purple as a faint breeze began to ruffle its surface, the azure of the sky became momentarily deeper and richer and more purple in tone, and presently, out from the clear cerulean depths started into view the planet Venus, beaming down upon us with a soft, silvery, lambent radiance, and tracing upon the bosom of the darkening wave a delicate thread of quivering liquid light—

“‘Who can paint like Nature?’” said a voice at my elbow, while an arm was slid quietly within my own, and I found myself joined by young Raleigh, a fellow-mid—and by all accounts a scion of the same family as the renowned Sir Walter—“what mortal brush could hope to emulate the exquisite softness, delicacy, richness, and power of those tints which have just faded out of the picture before us, or what artist could adequately express the quiet, dreamy beauty of the present scene? Dame Nature has been kind in permitting what will probably be our last glimpse for some time to come of our native land, to be one of such surpassing loveliness. We are bound to a region the beauty of which has been for ages a favourite theme among poets, yet I fancy many of us will look with yearning fondness upon the cherished memory of the parting smile with which old England has bidden us a long good-night.”

“I am sure I shall, for one,” said I, “I have heard and read much of the beauties of the ‘sunny South,’ but I find it difficult to imagine anything more exquisitely beautiful than many scenes which I have witnessed at home when Nature has been in her happier moods.”

“Ah! that is because you have never been away from home,” remarked Raleigh. “I have already been up the Mediterranean once, and without for a moment attempting to decry the—”

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