We breakfasted at a roadside inn, full early, not without inquiring glances from the landlady, for surely never before had she entertained such guests, so near the echo of cock-crow, and yet already dusty with travel.

And so into Romsey, in company with a profane tinker, who ambled, clattering, beside us, scattering anathemas broadcast. Trade was bad, said he, and he hadn’t the price of a pint in his pockets. Perhaps we had? Assuredly; but there it remained. Whereupon ensued references to “torffs,” coloured with the British adjective.

I have never happened upon Romsey in winter time, nor indeed on any other occasion save this, in a season of heat and drought, so say nothing as to its local name of Romsey-in-the-Mud. Its summer aspect is dry and somnolent; its streets apparently all too roomy for its present estate: but then we have not seen Romsey on market-day, which probably gives a different complexion to these streets, so ample and so unconventionally named. One enters Romsey from Winchester along The Hundred, and traverses the town through the Market Square and Horsefair, and leaves it for the New Forest by Mainstone.

But to the tourist the most interesting thing in Romsey is the Abbey church, wonderfully dilapidated and picturesque, picturesque with what we generally (and rightly) think the exaggerated picturesqueness of Prout’s architectural pictures. Prout himself could scarce have rendered Romsey Abbey more flamboyantly time-worn than it is. Wild flowers, and even large bushes, grow on its walls, and have forced apart their Norman masonry. Surely nowhere else is so lovely an example of ecclesiastical decay as here, where the shrubs and flowers, the ivy and gorgeous lichens, have draped and mantled these grey walls with a living glory. But perhaps ere these lines shall appear in print, those beauties will have been torn away. The restorer was at Romsey when we visited the Abbey; his scaffoldings were rising against the walls, and workmen were moving about the chevroned windows and portentous corbels that have grinned unchanging upon a changing world for nigh upon eight hundred years. Cats’-heads and double-headed chimeras peculiar to the Norman mind gape and leer from under cornices, and make the restorer’s masons, by comparison with their dim antiquity, seem as evanescent as the gadflies of a summer’s day. The hoariest tombstones in the churchyard below them are things of yesterday beside these contorted monsters. And now they will be scraped and trimmed and renewed, and the masonry reset, and all the weatherings of time improved away. Architects and contractors must live, even though to earn a livelihood they disastrously renew delightful work that has been mellowing for centuries. Everywhere the old work has been scraped, and glass-papered, and tinkered, and endued with a modern smugness, until, as you stand before it, you sigh for the richness of colour that was a delight and a warranty of antiquity. Romsey Abbey is almost entirely Norman—thick-limbed and sturdy, with a virile simplicity in its ornaments of pier and arch. Cruciform, its lantern at the crossing shows even the uninstructed traveller from a distance that here is something more than a parish church of usual type. From the bridge that crosses the Test by the flour mills, one sees the great bulk of the Abbey rising above the greenery of Romsey outskirts, and above all, the lantern, like a fairy crown, completes the picture.

There is a bronze statue of Palmerston standing in the Market Square of Romsey, unrecognisable to all who have been brought up on the conventional likenesses of “old Pam” that used to figure in Punch. We don’t expect the sculptor to give us the Palmerston of the rakishly cocked hat, with a straw in his mouth, but I fear it was with something very like disappointment that we regarded this very unsportsman-like effigy that stands, hatless, strawless, in a mild unjaunty attitude, with outstretched hand, in pose of eternal declamation.