Arras has a combined Hotel de Ville and belfry which puts the market-house and belfry of Bruges quite in the shade from an impressive architectural point of view. There is not the quiet, splendid severity of its more famous compeer at Bruges, but there is far more luxuriance in its architectural form, and, at any rate, it was a surprise and a pleasure to find that any such splendid monument were here.

The Spanish invasion of other days has left its mark all through Flanders, and here at Arras the florid Renaissance architecture of the Hotel de Ville and the vaults and roofs of the market-square are manifestly exotics from a land strange to French architectural ways.

Arras, with its quaint old arcaded market-place, is a great distributing-point for cereals. A million of francs' worth in value changes hands here in a year, and the sale, in small lots, out in the open, is a survival of the moyen age when the abbes of a neighbouring monastery levied toll for the privilege of selling on the market-place. Today the toll-gatherer, he who collects the small fee from the stall-owners, is still known as the Abbe.

Arras is quaint and interesting, and withal a lively, progressive town, where all manner of merchandizing is conducted along very businesslike lines. You can buy sewing-machines and agricultural machinery from America at Arras, and felt hats and orange marmalade (which the Frenchman calls, mysteriously, simply, "Dundee") from Britain.

To Douai, from Cambrai, was another hour's run. Douai has a Hotel de Ville and belfry, too, which were entirely unlooked for. Quaint, remarkable, and the pet and pride of the inhabitant, the bells of the belfry of Bible-making Douai ring out rag-time dances and Sousa marches. Such is the rage for up-to-dateness!

There is a goodly bit to see at Douai in the way of ecclesiastical monuments, but the chief attraction, that which draws strangers to the place, is the July "Fete de Gayant," at which M. and Mme. Gayant (giant), made of wickerwork and dressed more or less a la mode, are promenaded up and down the streets to the tune of the "Air de Gayante." All this is in commemoration of an unsuccessful attempt to capture the city by Louis XI. in 1479. The fete has been going on yearly ever since, and shows no signs of dying out, as does the Guy Fawkes celebration in England.

We were now going through France's "black country," the coal-fields of the north, and the gaunt scaffolds of the mine-pits dotted the landscape here and there, as they do in Pennsylvania or the Midlands of England. They did not especially disfigure the landscape, but gave a modern note of industry and prosperity which was as marked as that of the farmyards of the peasants and high-farmers of Normandy or La Beance. France is an exceedingly wealthy, and, what is more, a "self-contained" nation; and this fact should not be forgotten by the critics of what they like to call effete Europe.

Bethune is in the heart of the coal country, and is not a particularly lovely town. It has a dream of an old-world hotel, though, and one may go a great deal farther and fare a great deal worse than at Bethune's Hotel du Nord, a great rambling, stone Renaissance building, with heavy decorated window-frames, queer rambling staircases, and ponderous, beamed ceilings.



It sits on a little Place, opposite an isolated belfry, from whose upper window there twinkles, at night, a little star of light, like a mariner's beacon. What it is all supposed to represent no ones seems to know, but it is an institution which dies hard, and some one pays the expense of keeping it alight. A belfry is a very useful adjunct to a town. If the writer ever plans a modern city he will plant a belfry in the very centre, with four clock-faces on it, a sun-dial, a thermometer, and a peal of bells. You find all these things on the belfry of Bethune, and altogether it is the most picturesque, satisfying, and useful belfry the writer has ever seen.

The food and lodging of the Hotel du Nord at Bethune are as satisfactory as its location, and we were content indeed to remain the following day in the dull little town, because of a torrential downpour which kept us house-bound till four in the afternoon. If one really wants to step back into the dark ages, just let him linger thirty-six hours as we did at Bethune. More would probably drive him crazy with ennui, but this is just enough.

The road to the north ended for us at Calais. How many know Calais as they really ought? To most travellers Calais is a mere guide-post on the route from England or France.

Of less interest to-day, to the London tripper, than Boulogne and its debatable pleasures, Calais is a very cradle of history and romance.

It was in October, 1775, that Sterne set out on his immortal "sentimental journey." He put up, as the tale goes, at Dessein's Hotel at Calais (now pulled down), and gave it such a reputation among English-speaking people that its proprietor suddenly grew rich beyond his wildest hopes. So much for the publicity of literature, which, since Sterne's days, has boomed soap, cigars, and automobiles.

Sterne's familiarity with France was born of experience. He had fallen ill in London while supervising the publication of some of his literary works and was ordered to the south of France by his physicians. He obtained a year's absence from his curacy, and borrowed twenty pounds from his friend Garrick (which history, or rumour, says he never repaid) and left for—of all places—Paris, where a plunge into the whirl of social dissipation nearly carried him off his feet.

Sterne and Stevenson have written more charmingly of France and things French than any others in the English tongue, and if any one would like to make three little pilgrimages off the beaten track, by road or rail, by bicycle or automobile, let him follow the trail of Sterne in his "Sentimental Journey," or Stevenson in his "Inland Voyage" and his "Travels with a Donkey." They do not follow the "personally conducted" tourist routes, but they give a much better idea of France to one who wants to see things for himself.

Charles Dibdin, too, "muddled away five months at Calais," to quote his own words. He arrived from England after a thirteen-hours' passage in a gale of wind, in which he composed his most famous sea-song, "Blow High, Blow Low." Travellers across the channel have been known to occupy thirteen hours on the passage since Dibdin's time, and seemingly, in the experience of the writer, there is not a time when the words of the song might not apply.

We had come to Calais for the purpose of crossing the Channel for a little tour awheel amid the natural beauties and historic shrines of Merry England.

It takes fifty-five minutes, according to the Railway-Steamship time-cards, to make the passage from Calais to Dover, but the writer has never been able to make one of these lightning passages.

Automobiles are transported by the mail-boats only upon "special arrangements," information upon which point is given so vaguely that one suspects bribery and craft.

We did not bite, but went over by the night cargo-boat, at least the automobile did, at a cost of a hundred francs. This is cheap or dear, according to the way you look at it. For the service rendered it is dear, for the accommodation to you it is, perhaps, cheap enough. At any rate, it is cheap enough when you want to get away from England again, its grasping hotel-keepers, and its persecuting police.

Why do so many English automobilists tour abroad, Mr. British Hotel-keeper and Mr. Police Sergeant? One wonders if you really suspect.

Part III On Britain's Roads

Chapter I The Bath Road



The Bath Road is in many ways the most famed main road out of London. Visions as varied as those of highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, boating at Maidenhead, the days of the "dandies" at Bath, and of John Cabot at Bristol flashed through our minds whenever we heard the Bath road mentioned, so we set out with a good-will on the hundred and eighteen mile journey to Bath.

To-day the road's designation is the same as of yore, though Palmer's coaches, that in 1784 left London at eight in the morning and arrived at Bristol at eleven at night, have given way to automobiles which make the trip in three hours. You can be three hours or thirty, as you please. We figured it out for thirty-six and lunched, dined, slept, and breakfasted en route, and felt the better for it.

The real popularity of the Bath road and its supremacy in coaching circles a century and a quarter ago—a legacy which has been handed down to automobilists of to-day—was due to the initiative of one John Palmer, a gentleman of property, who had opened a theatre at Bath, and was sorely annoyed at the delays he had to submit to in obtaining star actors from London to appear on particular nights. Palmer was a man with a grievance, but he was also a man with ability and purpose. He travelled about, and made notes and observations, and organized a scheme by which coaching might be brought into a complete system; he memorialized the government, was opposed by the post-office authorities, abused, sneered at, laughed at, but not beaten; finally he gained the ear of William Pitt, who saw that there was more in the proposed plan than a mere experiment. On the 8th of August, 1784, Palmer ran his first mail-coach from London to Bristol, and made the journey in fifteen hours. That was the turning-point. The old lumbering coaches, the abominable roads, the irresponsible drivers, the wretched delay, misery, and uncertainty rapidly gave place to lighter, stronger, and more commodious vehicles, better horses, more experienced drivers, careful guards, regular stages, marked by decent inns and comfortable hostelries, and improved roads. The post-office made a contract with the coaching speculator—a very safe contract indeed—by which he was to have two and one-half per cent of the money saved in the conveyance of letters. This would have yielded twenty thousand pounds a year; so the government broke its agreement, refused to vote the payment, and compromised with Mr. Palmer and its own conscience, after the fashion of politicians of all time, by a grant of fifty thousand pounds.



The Bath road traverses a section of England that is hardly as varied as would be a longer route from north to south, but, on the whole, it is characteristically English throughout, and is as good an itinerary as any by which to make one's first acquaintance with English days and English ways.

Via Hammersmith, Kew Bridge, Brentford, and Hounslow was our way out of town, and a more awful, brain-racking, and discouraging start it would have been impossible to make. London streets are ever difficult to thread with an automobile, and when the operation is undertaken on a misty, moisty morning with what the Londoner knows as grease thick under foot and wheel, the process is fraught with the possibility of adventure.

Out through Piccadilly and Knightsbridge was bad enough, but, by the time Hammersmith Broadway, its trams and tram-lines and its butchers' and bakers' and milk carts, was reached and passed, it was as if one had been trying to claw off a lee shore in a gale, and driver and passengers alike felt exceeding limp and sticky. The Londoner who drives an automobile thinks nothing of it, and covers the intervening miles with a cool clear-headedness that is marvellous. We were new to automobiling in England, but we were fast becoming acclimated.

On through Chiswick there were still the awful tram-lines, but the roadway improved and was wider and free from abrupt turns and twists. We congratulated ourselves that at last we had got clear of town, but we had reckoned beyond our better judgment, for we had forgotten that we had been told that Brentford was the most awful death-trap that the world has known for automobilists, cyclists, and indeed foot-passers as well. We should have kept a little of our nerve by us, for we needed it when we got shut in between a brewer's dray, an omnibus, and an electric tram-car in Brentford's sixteen-foot "main road." It was like an interminable canyon, gloomy, damp, and dangerous for all living things which passed its portals, this main street of Brentford. For some miles, apparently, this same congestion of traffic continued, a tram-car ahead and behind you, drays, trucks, and carts all around you, and fool butchers' cart and milk cart drivers turning unexpected corners to the likely death of you and themselves. Here is an automobile reform which might well attract the attention of the authorities in England. The automobile has as much right to be a road user as any other form of traffic, and, if the automobile is to be regulated as to its speed and progress, it is about time that the same regulations were applied also to other classes of traffic.

We finally got out of Brentford and came to Low, where suburban improvement has gone to widen the roadway and put the two lines of tramway in the middle, allowing a free passage on either side. The wood pavement, which we had followed almost constantly since leaving London, soon disappeared, and, finally, so did the tramway. After perhaps fifteen miles we were at last approaching open country; at least Suburbia and perambulators had been left behind; and truck-gardens and market-wagons, often with sleepy drivers, had entered on the scene. Here was a new danger, but not so terrible as those we had left behind, and the poor, docile horse usually had sense enough to draw aside and let us pass, even if the beer-drowsy driver had not.

We soon reached the top of Hounslow Heath, but there was scarcely a suggestion of the former romantic aspect which we had always connected with it.

We made inquiries and learned that there was one old neighbouring inn, the "Green Man," lying between the Bath and Exeter roads, which was a true relic of the past, and musty with the traditions of turnpike travellers and highwaymen of old. We found the "Green Man" readily enough, with a country yokel to point the way, for which he expected the price of a beer. In the palmy days of the robbing and murdering traffic of Hounslow Heath it was a convenient refuge for the Duvals and Turpins, and they made for it with a rush on occasion, secreting themselves in a hiding-place which can still be seen.

This is in a little room on the left of the front door, and the entrance lies at the back of an old-fashioned fireplace. A hole leads to a passage which opens into a cavernous recess beneath, to which there is ample room for anybody to descend. The local wiseacres declare that there is, or was, a communication between this secret chamber and another famous highwayman's inn, the old "Magpie" directly on the Bath road, and that those who preyed on travellers used to bolt from one house to the other like hunted rabbits. No one seemingly has himself ever explored this mysterious subterranean passage. Beyond Hounslow, on the Bath road, one passes through Slough, leaving Windsor, Runnymede, and Datchet on the left, as properly belonging to the routine tours which one makes from London and calls simply excursions.

The Thames is reached at Maidenhead, where up-river society plays a part which reminds one of the stage melodramas, except that there is real water and real boat-races. It is a pretty enough aspect up and down the river from the bridge at Maidenhead, but it is stagey and artificial.

The hotels and restaurants of Maidenhead make some pretence of catering to automobilists, and do it fairly well, after a suburban fashion, but there is nothing of the flavour or sentiment of the old inn-keeping days, neither are any of the establishments at all what the touring automobilist (as distinct from the promenading, or half-day excursion variety) expects and demands.



The Bath road runs straight on through Twyford to Reading, but we made a detour via Great Marlow and Henley, merely for the satisfaction of lunching at the "Red Lion Inn" at the latter place. The great social and sporting attractions of the Thames, the annual Henley regatta, had drawn us thither years ago, and we had enjoyed ourselves in the conventional manner, shouting ourselves hoarse over rival crews, lunching, picnic fashion, from baskets under the trees, and making our way back to town by the railway, amid a terrifying crush late at night. It was all very enjoyable, but once in a lifetime was quite enough. Now we were taking things easier.

The traditions hanging around the old "Red Lion Inn," beside the bridge, probably account for its popularity, for certainly its present-day accommodations and catering are nothing remarkable, and the automobilist is looked upon with disfavour. Why? This is hard to state. He is a good spender, the automobilist, and he comes frequently. All the same, the "Red Lion Inn" at Henley is one of those establishments marked down in the guide-books as "comfortable," and if its luncheon is a bit slow and stodgy, it is wholesome enough, and automobilists are generally blessed with good appetites.

The Shenstone legend and the window-pane verses about finding "one's warmest welcome at an inn" were originally supposed to apply to this inn at Henley. Later authorities say that they referred to an inn at Henley-in-Arden. Perhaps an automobilist, even, would find the latter more to his liking. The writer does not know.

To Reading from Henley is perhaps a dozen miles, by a pretty river road which shows all the characteristic loveliness of the Thames valley about which poets have raved. By Shiplake Mill, Sonning, and Caversham Bridge one finally enters Reading. Reading is famous for the remains of an old abbey and for its biscuits, but neither at the time had any attractions for us.

We made another detour from our path and followed the river-road to Abingdon. Pangborne (better described as Villadom) was passed, as was also Mapledurham, which Dick of William Morris's "Utopia" thought "a very pretty place." In fine it is a very pretty place, and the river hereabouts is quite at its prettiest.

Since we had actually left towns and trams behind us we found the roadways good, but abominably circuitous and narrow, not to say dangerous because of it.

Soon Streatley Hill rose up before us. Streatley is one of those villages which have been pictured times innumerable. One often sees its winding streets, its picturesque cottages, its one shop, its old mill, "The Bull Inn," or its notorious bridge over the river to Goring.

To cross this bridge costs six pence per wheel, be your conveyance a cart, carriage, bicycle, or motor-car, so that if an automobile requires any slight attention from the machinist, who quarters himself at Goring boat-house, it is appreciably cheaper to bargain with him to come to Streatley. Thus one may defeat the object of the grasping institution which, the lady toll-taker tells you, is responsible for the outrage, and not she herself. You may well believe her; she hardly looks as though she approved of the means which serve to keep her in her modest position.



Streatley Hill, or rather the view from it, like the village itself, is famed alike by poet and painter. The following quatrain should be eulogy enough to warrant one's taking a rather stiff climb in the hope of experiencing, to a greater or a lesser degree, the same emotions:

"When you're here, I'm told that you Should mount the Hill and see the view; And gaze and wonder, if you'd do Its merits most completely."

The poetry is bad, but the sentiment is sound.

Goring is more of a metropolis than Streatley, but we did not visit the former town because of the atrocious toll-bridge charge. We were willing enough to make martyrs of ourselves in the good cause of the suppression of all such excessive charges to automobilists.

On through Abingdon, and still following the valley of the Thames, we kept to Faringdon and Lechlade, where, at the latter place, at the subtly named "Trout Inn," we proposed passing the night.

We did pass the night at the "Trout Inn," which has no accommodation for automobiles, except a populated hen-house, the general sleeping-place of most of the live stock of the landlord, dogs, cats, ducks, and geese; to say nothing of the original occupants—the hens. How much better they do things in France!

At any rate there is no pretence about the "Trout Inn" at Lechlade. We slept in a stuffy, diamond-paned little room with chintz curtains to windows, bed, and mantelpiece. We dined off of trout, beefsteak, and cauliflower, and drank bitter beer until midnight in the bar-parlour with a half-dozen old residents who told strange tales of fish and fishing. Here at least was the real thing, though the appointments of the inn were in no sense picturesque, and the landlord, instead of being a rotund, red-faced person, was a tall, thin reed of a man with a white beard who, in spite of his eighty odd years, is about as lively a proposition as one will find in the business in England.

Mine host of "The Trout," silvered as the aspen, but straight as the pine, bears his eighty-two years lightly, and will tell you that he is still able to protect his fishing rights, which he owns in absolute fee on four miles of river-bank, against trespassers—and they are many. He sleeps, he says, with one eye open, and his gun by his side, and thinks nothing of a sally forth in the dark hours of night and exploding a charge in the direction of a marauder. He and his cronies of the tap-room, of an evening, before a glowing fire of logs, above which is the significant gun-rack (quite in old picture-book fashion), will give a deal of copy to an able writer who seeks atmosphere and local colour.

Kelmscott, so identified with William Morris, is even less of the world of to-day than is its neighbour, Lechlade, and was one of the reasons for our coming here at all.

The topographical surveys and books of reference will tell on that it is a "chapelry, in the parish of Broadwell, Union of Faringdon, hundred of Bampton, county of Oxford;" that it is "two miles east of Lechlade and contains 179 inhabitants;" and that "by measurement it contains 1,020 acres, of which 876 are arable and 153 meadow and pasture." It is unlikely that the population has increased since the above description; the best authority claims that it has actually decreased, like so many of the small towns and villages of the countryside in England.

Kelmscott Manor House was advertised for sale in 1871, a fact which Morris discovered quite by accident. Writing to his friend Faulkner he says:

"I have been looking about for a house... my eye is turned now to Kelmscott, a little village two miles above Radcott Bridge—a Heaven on earth."

The house is thirty miles or more from Oxford, by water, approached by a lane which leads from Lechlade just over St. John's Bridge, by the "Trout Inn." The railway now reaches Lechlade but this was not the case when Morris first found this "Heaven." Most likely he reached it by carriage from Faringdon, "by the grand approach over the hills of Berkshire."

We regained the Bath road at Marlborough, after our excursion into the realms of Utopia, intending to reach Bath for lunch. The best laid plans of mice and mere motor-men ofttimes go awry, and we did not get to Bath until well on into the night. There was really no reason for this except an obstinate bougie (beg pardon, sparking-plug in English) which sparked beautyfully in the open air, but which refused positively to give a glimmer when put in its proper place. We did not know this, or even suspect it at first, but this was what delayed us four hours, just before we reached Chippenham, where we stopped and lunched, through no choice of our own, for it was a bad lunch in every particular, and cost three shillings and sixpence a head. To add to the indignity, the local policemen came along and said we were making an obstruction, and insisted that we push the machine into the stable-yard, as if we were committing a breach of the law, when really it was only an opportunity for a "bobby" to show his authority. Happy England!

All the morning we had been running over typical English roads and running well. There is absolutely no question but that the countryside of England is unequalled for that unique variety of picturesqueness which is characteristic of the land, but it lacks the grandeur that one finds in France, or indeed in most countries of Continental Europe.

Crossing England thus, one gets the full force of Rider Haggard's remarks about the small farmer; how, because he cannot get a small holding, that can be farmed profitably, for his very own, he becomes a tenant, or remains always a labourer, never rising in the social scale.

The peasant of Continental Europe may be poor and impoverished, may eat largely of bread instead of meat, and be forced to drink "thin wine" instead of body-building beer,—as the economists in England put it,—but he has much to be thankful for, nevertheless.

We stopped just before Beckhampton, at a puzzling crossroads, and asked a labourer of the fields if we were "right" for Chippenham. He stared blankly, doffed his hat with humility, but for a time answered never a word. He knew Calne, a town half a dozen miles away, for he occasionally, walked in there for a drinking-bout on a heavier brand of beer than he could buy locally, but, though he had always heard of Chippenham, he did not know whether it lay north, east, south, or west. This is deplorable, of course, for it was within a twenty-mile radius, but it is astonishing the frequency with which one meets this blankness in England when looking for information. There are tens of thousands like this poor fellow, and one may well defy Rider Haggard to make a "landed proprietor" out of such poor stuff.

You do not always get what you ask for in France, but the peasant at least knows enough to tell you, "Oh! that's down in the Eure" or "Plus loin, par la," and at any rate, you feel that he is a broad-gauge Frenchman through and through, whereas the English labourer of the fields is a very "little Englander" indeed.

It is hard to believe on a bright May morning that here, in this blossoming, picturesque little village of Chippenham, on one bitterly cold morning in the month of April, 1812, when the Bath coach reached its posting-house (the same, perhaps, Mr. Up-to-Date Automobilist, at which you have slept the night—worse luck), two of its outside passengers were found frozen to death, and a third all but dead. The old lithographs which pictured the "Royal Mail" stuck in a snow-drift, and the unhappy passengers helping to dig it out, are no longer apocryphal in your mind after you have heard this bit of "real history," which happened, too, in one of England's southern counties. The romance of other days was often stern and uncomfortable reality of a most bitter kind.

We left Chippenham, finally, very late in the day, lost our way at unsign-boarded and puzzling crossroads, had two punctures in a half a dozen miles, and ultimately reached the centre of Bath, over the North Parade Bridge—for which privilege we paid three pence, another imposition, which, however, we could have avoided had we known the devious turnings of the main road into town.

In two days we had covered something like two hundred and fifty miles in and out of highways and byways, had followed the Thames for its entire boatable length, and had crossed England,—not a very great undertaking as automobile tours go, but a varied and enjoyable one in spite of the restrictions put upon the free passage of automobiles by the various governing bodies and the indifferent hotel-keepers.

Bath and its attractions for visitors are quite the best things of their kind in all England, in spite of the fact that the attractions, the teas, the concerts, and the lectures—to say nothing of drinking and bathing in the waters—lack individuality.

We stayed the round of the clock at Bath, two rounds and a half, in fact, in that we did not leave until the second morning after our arrival, and absorbed as much of the spirit and association of the place as was possible, including sundry gallons of the bubbling spring-water.

Bath has pleased many critical souls, James McNeill Whistler for one, who had no patience with other English resorts. It pleased us, too. It was so different.

From Bath to Bristol is a dozen miles only, and the topographical characteristics change entirely, following the banks of the little river Avon. Bristol was a great seaport in days gone by, but today only coasters and colliers make use of its wharves. The town is charmingly situated, but it is unlovely, and, for the tourist, is only a stepping-stone to somewhere else. The Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland directs one to the suburb of Clifton, or rather to Clifton Down, for hotel accommodation, but you can do much better than that by stopping at the Half Moon Hotel in the main street, a frankly commercial house, but with ample garage accommodation and good plain fare, of which roast little pig, boiled mutton, cauliflower, and mashed potatoes, with the ever recurring apple tart, form the principal items.

Chapter II The South Coast



The south coast of England is ever dear to the Londoner who spends his week's end out of town. Here he finds the nearest whiff of salt-water breeze that he can call his own. He may go down the Thames on a Palace steamer to Southend, and he will have to content himself most of the way with a succession of mud-flats and eat winkles with a brassy pin when he gets there; he may even go on to Margate and find a fresh east wind which will blow the London fog out of his brain; but, until he rounds the Foreland, he will find nothing that will remind him in the least of his beloved Eastbourne, Brighton, and Worthing.

The most popular south coast automobile run from London is to Brighton, fifty-two miles, via Croyden, Redhill, and Crawley. Many "weekenders" make this trip nearly every Saturday to Monday in the year, and get to know every rut and stone in the roadway and every degenerate policeman of the rapacious crew who hide in hedges and lie in wait for poor unfortunate automobilists who may have slipped down a sloping bit of clear roadway at a speed of twenty and one-tenth miles per hour (instead of nineteen and nine-tenths), all figured out by rule of thumb and with the aid of a thirty-shilling stop-watch.

"Ils sont terribles, ces betes des gendarmes on trouve en Angleterre," said a terror-stricken French friend of ours who had been held up beyond Crawley for a "technical offence." Nothing was said against a drunken drayman who backed his wagon up against our friend's mudguard ten miles back, and smashed it beyond repair. Justice, thy name is not in the vocabulary of the English policeman sent out by his sergeant to keep watch on automobilists!

Our road to the sea was by Rochester, Canterbury, and Dover, in the first instance, following much the itinerary of Chaucer's pilgrims.

Southwark's Tabard Inn exists to-day, in name if not in spirit, and it was easy enough to take it for our starting-point. Getting out of London to the southeast is not as bad as by the northwest, but in all conscience it is bad enough, through Deptford and its docks, and Greenwich and Woolwich, and over the Plumstead marshes. There are variants of this itinerary, we were told, but all are equally smelly and sooty, and it was only well after we had passed Gravesend that we felt that we had really left town behind, and even then we could see the vermilion stacks of great steamships making their way up London's river to the left, and the mouse-brown sails of the barges going round the coast to Ipswich and Yarmouth.

At last a stretch of green unsmoked and unspoiled country, that via Stroud to Rochester, came into view.

Rochester on the Medway, with its memories of Mr. Pickwick and the Bull Inn (still remaining), the cathedral and Gad's Hill, Dickens's home near by, is a literary shrine of the first importance. We stopped en route and did our duty, but were soon on our way again through the encumbered main street of Chatham and up the long hill to Sittingbourne, itself a dull, respectable market-town with a boiled mutton and grilled kipper inn which offers no inducements to a gormand to stop for lunch.

We kept on to Canterbury and didn't do much better at a hotel which shall be nameless. The hotels are all bad at Canterbury, according to Continental standards, and there is little choice between them.

It is said that the oldest inn in England is "The Fountain" at Canterbury. "The Fountain" claims to have housed the wife of Earl Godwin when she came to meet her husband on his return from Denmark in the year 1029, and to have been the temporary residence of Archbishop Lanfranc whilst his palace was being rebuilt in 1070. There is a legend, too, that the four knights who murdered Thomas a Becket made this house their rendezvous. Moreover, "The Fountain" can boast of a testimonial to its excellence as an inn written six hundred years ago, for, when the marriage of Edward the First to his second queen, Margaret of France, was solemnized at Canterbury Cathedral on September 12, 1299, the ambassador of the Emperor of Germany, who was among the distinguished guests, wrote thus to his master: "The inns in England are the best in Europe, those of Canterbury are the best in England, and 'The Fountain,' wherein I am now lodged as handsomely as I were in the king's palace, the best in Canterbury." Times have changed since the days of Edward I.!

Canterbury is a very dangerous town to drive through. Its streets are narrow and badly paved, and there are unexpected turnings which bring up a lump in one's throat when he is driving at his most careful gait and is suddenly confronted with a governess's cart full of children, a perambulator, and a bath-chair, all in the middle of the road, where, surely, the two latter have no right to be.

The grand old shrine of Thomas a Becket, the choir built by Lanfranc's monks, and the general ensemble of the cathedral close are worth all the risk one goes through to get to them. The cathedral impresses one as the most thoroughly French of all the Gothic churches of Britain, and because of this its rank is high among the ecclesiastical architectural treasures of the world. Its history is known to all who know that of England, of the church, and of architecture, and the edifice tells the story well.

The distant view from the road, as one approaches the city, is one that can only be described as grand. The fabric of the great cathedral, the rooftops of the houses, the sloping hills rising from the water's edge, and again falling lightly down to the town, form a grandly imposing view, the equal of which one seldom sees on the main travelled roads of England.

Between Canterbury and Winchester ran one of the oldest roads in England, the "Pilgrim's Way." Many parts of it still exist, and it is believed by many to be the oldest monument of human work in these islands. About two-thirds of the length of the road is known with certainty, and to some extent the old itinerary forms the modern highway. Its earliest route seems to have been from Stonehenge to Canterbury, but later the part from Stonehenge to Alton was abandoned in favour of that from Winchester to Alton. Guildford and Dorking were places that it touched, though it was impossible to say with certainty where it crossed the Medway.

Margate, Ramsgate, and the Isle of Thanet lay to the left of us, but we struck boldly across the downs to Dover's Bay, under the shadow of the Shakespeare Cliff, made famous in the scenic accessories of The Tempest.

Dover, seventy-two miles by road from London, has a good hotel, almost reaching the Continental standard, though it is not an automobile hotel and you must house your machine elsewhere. It is called the Lord Warden Hotel, and is just off the admiralty pier head. It suited us very well in spite of the fact that the old-school Englishman contemptuously refers to it as a place for brides and for seasick Frenchmen waiting the prospect of a fair crossing by the Calais packet.

The descent into Dover's lower town from the downs above is fraught with considerable danger for the automobilist. It is steep, winding, and narrow, and one climbs out of it again the next morning by an equally steep, though less narrow, road up over the Shakespeare Cliff and down again abruptly into Folkestone.

Dover is not fashionable as a resort, and its one pretentious sea-front hotel is not a lovely thing—most sea-front hotels are not. In spite of this there is vastly more of interest going on, with the coming and going of the great liners and the cross-channel boats of the harbour, than is to be found in a mere watering-place, where band concerts, parade-walks, "nigger minstrels," tea fights, and excursions in the neighbourhood are the chief attractions which are advertised, and are fondly believed by the authorities to be sufficient to draw the money-spending crowds.

Dover is a very interesting place; the Shakespeare Cliff dominates it on one side and the old castle ruin on the other, to-day as they did when the first of the Cinq-Ports held England's destiny in the hollow of her hand. Sir Walter Raleigh prayed his patron Elizabeth to strengthen her fortifications here and formulate plans for a great port. Much was done by her, but a fitting realization of Dover's importance as a deep-water port has only just come to pass, and then only because of a significant hint from the German emperor.

Shakespeare's, or Lear's, Cliff at Dover is one of the first things to which the transatlantic up-channel traveller's attention is called. Blind old Gloster has thus described it:

"There is a cliff whose high and bending head Looks fearfully into the confined deep."

The English War Department of today, it is rumoured, would erase this landmark, because the cliff obstructs the range of heavy guns, thus jeopardizing the defence of Dover; but there are those who, knowing that chalk is valuable, suggest that commercialism is at the foundation of the scheme for destroying the cliff. The Dover corporation has accordingly passed a resolution of remonstrance against the destruction of what they claim "would rob the English port of one of its most thrilling attractions."

Folkestone is more sadly respectable than Dover; more homeopathic, one might say. The town is equally difficult for an automobile to make its way through, but as one approaches the water's edge things somewhat improve. Wampach's Hotel at Folkestone is not bad, but B. B. B., as the "Automobile Club's Hand Book" puts it (bed, bath, and breakfast), costs eight shillings and sixpence a day. This is too much for what you get.

We followed the shore road to Hythe, Dymchurch, New Romney, and Rye, perhaps thirteen miles all told, along a pebble-strewn roadway with here and there a glimpse of the shining sea and the smoke from a passing steamer.

To our right was Romney Marsh, calling up memories of the smuggling days of old, when pipes of port and bales of tobacco mysteriously found their way inland without paying import duties.

Rye is by no means a resort; it is simply a dull, sleepy, red-roofed little seaside town, with, at sunset, a riot of blazing colour reflected from the limpid pools left by the retreating waters of the Channel, which now lies five miles away across a mud-flat plain, although coastwise shipping once came to Rye's very door-step.

The entrance to the town, by an old mediaeval gateway, is easily enough made by a careful driver, but an abrupt turn near the top of the slight rise cost us a mud-guard, it having been ripped off by an unexpected and most dangerous hitching-post. This may be now removed; it certainly is if the local policeman did his duty and reported our really atrocious language to the authorities. Of all imbecilic and unneedful obstructions to traffic, Rye's half-hidden hitching-post is one of the most notable seen in an automobile tour comprising seven countries and several hundreds, perhaps thousands, of large and small towns.

The chief curiosities of Rye are its quaint hilltop church, the town walls, and the Ypres tower, all quite foreign in motive and aspect from anything else in England.

Those interested in literary shrines may well bow their heads before the door of the dignified Georgian house near the church, in which resides the enigmatic Henry James. There may be other literary lights who shed a glow over Rye, but we did not learn of them, and surely none could be more worthy of the attention of literary lion-hunters than the American who has become "more English" than the English themselves.

We left Rye by a toll-gate road over the marshes, bound for Winchelsea, and, passing through the ivy-clad tower which spans the roadway, stopped abruptly, like all hero or heroine worshippers, before the dainty home of Ellen Terry. The creeper-clung little brick cottage is a reminiscence of old-world peace and quiet which must be quite refreshing after an active life on the stage.

Hastings saw us for the night. Hastings and St. Leonards, twin sea-front towns, are what, for a better description, might be called snug and smug. They are simply the most depressing, unlovely resorts of sea-front and villas that one will see in a round of all the English resorts.

As a pompous, bustling, self-sufficient little city, Hastings, with its fisher men and women, its fish-market and the ruined castle-crowned height, has some quaintness and character; but as a resort where the chief amusements are scrappy, tuneless hurdy-gurdies, blatant brass bands, living picture shows, or third-rate repetitious of a last year's London theatrical successes, it is about the rankest boring proposition which ever drew the unwary visitor.

We had our "B. B. B." that night at the Queen's Hotel, a vast barracks of a place near the end of the Parade. The best thing about it was the view from the windows of our sleeping-rooms, and the fact that we could stable our automobile under the same roof.

We made a little run inland from Hastings the next morning to view old Battle Abbey. The battlement-crowned gateway is still one of the architectural marvels of England. It took us a dozen miles out of our way, but always among the rolling downs which dip down to the sea, chalk-faced and grass-grown in a manner characteristic only of the south coast of England.

We came to Eastbourne through Pevensey, famed for its old ruined castle and much history. A low-lying marsh-grown fishing-port of olden times, Pevensey was the landing-place of the Conqueror when he came to lay the foundation-stones of England's greatness. It is a shrine that Britons should bow down before, and reverently.

Eastbourne is a vast improvement, as a resort, over any south coast town we had yet seen. It is not gay, it is rather sedate, and certainly eminently respectable and dignified. Giant wheels, hurdy-gurdies, and quack photographers are banished from its beach and esplanade, and one may stroll undisturbed by anything but perambulators and bath-chairs. Its sea-front walk of a couple of miles or more is as fine as any that can be found from the Foreland to the Lizard.

Most energetically we climbed to the top of Beachy Head, gossiped with the coast-guard, stole a peep through the telescope by which Lloyd's observer at the signal-station picks out passing ships, and got down the great hill again in time for lunch at the Burlington Hotel. We lunched in more or less stately fashion, well, if not luxuriously, in a great dining-room whose sole occupant, besides ourselves, was England's laureate.

He is herein endorsed as possessing a good taste in seaside hotels, whatever one may think of the qualities of his verse. The Burlington seemed to us the best conducted and most satisfactory hotel on all the south coast, except perhaps the Lord Warden at Dover.

It was a more or less rugged climb, by a badly made road, up over the downs from Eastbourne, only to drop down again as quickly through Eastdean to Newhaven, a short ten miles, but a trying one.

Newhaven is a sickly burg sheltered well to the west of Beachy Head. Its only excitements are the comings and goings of the Dieppe steamers and a few fishing-boats. It is one of the best ports for shipping one's automobile to France, and one of the cheapest. In no other respect is Newhaven worth a glance of the eye, and English travelers themselves have no good word for the abominable tea and coffee served to limp, half-famished travellers as they get off the Dieppe boat. This well-worn and well-deserved reputation was no inducement for us to stop, so we made speed for Brighton via Rottingdean.

Rottingdean will be famous in most minds as being the rival of Brattleboro, Vt., as the home of Rudyard Kipling. Sightseers came from Brighton in droves and stared the author out of countenance, as they did at Brattleboro, and he removed to the still less known, and a great deal less accessible, village of Burwash in Kent. Thus passed the fame of Rottingdean.

Brighton has been called London-on-Sea, and with some truth, but as the sun shines here with frequency it differs from London in that respect.

Brighton is a brick and iron built town, exceedingly unlovely, but habitable. Its two great towering sea-front hotels look American, but they are a great deal more substantially built. There are two rivals for popular favour, the Grand and the Metropole. They are much alike in all their appointments, but there are fewer tea-drinkers and after-dinner sleepers (and snorers) at the Metropole. There is also a famous old coaching house, the Ship Hotel (most curiously named), which caters particularly for automobilists.

Brighton is the typical seaside resort of Britain. It is like nothing on the Continent; it is not even as attractive a place as most Continental resorts; but it is the best thing in Britain.

Brighton and Hove have a sea-front of perhaps three miles. Houses and hotels line the promenade on one side, a pebbly beach and the sea on the other.

The attractions of Brighton are conventional and an imitation of those in London. In addition one bathes, in summer, in the lapping waves, and in winter sits in a glass shelter which breaks the wind, and gazes seaward.

There are theatrical attractions and operas in the theatre, and vocal and instrumental concerts on the pier, all through the year. There are also various sorts of functions which go on in the turnip-topped Royal Pavilion of the Georges, which once seen will ever afterward be avoided.

It is not always bright and sunny at Brighton. We were storm-bound at the Metropole for two days, and the Channel waves dashed up over the pier and promenade and drowned out the strollers who sought to take their constitutional abroad.

We sat tight in the hotel and listened to Sousa marches, "Hiawatha," and "The Belle of New York" strummed out by a none too competent band. A genial fat-faced old lady of uncertain age tried to inveigle us into a game of bridge, but that was not what we came for, so we strenuously refused.

The flood-tide of holiday trippers at Brighton is in August. This is the month when, at certain periods of the day, the mile length of roadway from railway station to sea is a closely packed crowd of excursionists; when the long expanse of sea-front and sand presents its most animated spectacle of holiday-keeping people; when the steamers plying along the Sussex coast, or to France, the white-sailed yachts, the rowing-boats, and motor-boats are the most numerous; and when the hundred and one entertainers and providers of all kinds do their busiest trade.

There is a public bathing-station at the eastern end of the sea-front. A large marquee is provided, and a worthy lady, the incarnation of the British matron, sees to it that the curtains are properly drawn and that inquisitive small boys keep their distance. But it is rather a long walk from the marquee to the water when the tide is low, and one often hears the camera click on the irresistible charms of some swan-like creature ambling down to deep water. The authorities have promised to put a stop to such liberties. Can they?

We left Brighton with a very good idea indeed of what it was like. It has a place to fill and it fills it very well, but the marvel is that the Britisher submits to it, when he can spend his weekends, or his holiday, at Boulogne or Dieppe for practically the same expenditure of time and money, and get real genuine relaxation and a gaiety which is not forced. So much for Brighton.

The Brighton police authorities have heeded the words of admonition of the tradesmen and hotel-keepers, and the automobilist has an easy time of it. It is an example which it is to be hoped will be far-reaching in its effects.

The road by the coast runs along by New Shoreham to Worthing, where the automobilist is catered for in really satisfactory fashion at Warne's Hotel, which possesses what is called a motor depot, a name which describes its functions in an obvious manner. It is a good place to lunch and a good place to obtain gasoline and oil. What more does the touring automobilist want? Not much but good roads and ever varying scenery.

Worthing has a population of twenty-five thousand conservative souls, and a mild climate. Its popularity is only beginning, but it boasts 1,748 hours of sunshine, an exceedingly liberal allowance for an English resort. It has also a "school of cookery;" this may account for the fare being as excellent as it is at "Warne's," though the proprietors are silent on this point.

Littlehampton came next in our itinerary. It almost equals Rye as one of the picture spots of England's south coast. It may develop some day into an artist's sketching ground which will rival the Cornish coast. It has a tidal river with old boats and barges lying picturesquely about, and it permits "mixed bathing," a rarity in England. In spite of this there appears to be no falling off in morals, and when other English seaside resorts adopt the same procedure they will be falling out of the conservatism which is keeping many of them from developing at the rate of Littlehampton.

We left the coast here to visit Arundel and its castle, the seat of the Duke of Norfolk. It was a Friday and the keep and park were open to the public.

Arundel is an ancient town which sleeps its life away and lives up to the traditions of mediaevalism in truly conservative fashion. The Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland makes no recommendation as to the hotels of Arundel, and presumably the Norfolk Arms cares nothing for the automobile traffic. We did not stop at any hotel, but left our machine outside the castle gate, enjoyed the conventional stroll about inside the walls and in an hour were on the way to Chichester.

Sussex is a county which, according to some traditions possesses four particular delicacies. Izaak Walton, in 1653, named them as follows: a Selsea cockle, a Chichester lobster, an Arundel mullet, and an Amberley trout. Another authority, Ray, adds to these three more: a Pulborough eel, a Rye herring, and a Bourn wheatear, which, he says, "are the best in their kind, understand it, of those that are taken in this country."

Chichester is a cathedral town not usually included in the itinerary of stranger-tourists. Its proud old cathedral and its detached bell-tower are remarkable for many things, but the strangeness of the belfry, entirely unconnected with the church fabric itself, will strike the natives of the land of skyscrapers most of all.

Chichester is conservative in all things, and social affairs, said a public-house habitue, are entirely dominated by the cathedral clique. He may have been a bad authority, this doddering old septuagenarian, mouthing his pint of beer, but he entertained us during the half-hour of a passing shower with many plain-spoken opinions about many things, including subjects as wide apart as clericalism and submarines.

Our route from Chichester was to Portsmouth and Southsea, neither of which interested us to any extent. The former is warlike in every turn of its crooked streets and the latter is full of retired colonels and majors, who keep always to the middle of the footpath across Southsea Common, and will not turn the least bit to one side, for courtesy or any other reason. Too much curry on their rice or port after dinner probably accounts for it.

We stopped at the George at Portsmouth. It offers no accommodation for automobiles, but a garage is near by. The halo of sentiment and romance hung over the more or less dingy old hotel, dingy but clean, and possessed of a parlour filled with a collection of old furniture which would make the connoisseur want to carry it all away with him.

This was the terminus of old-time travel from London to Portsmouth. The Portsmouth road, in coaching days as in automobile days, ran through England's fairest counties down to her emporium of ships. Its beginnings go back to the foundations of England's naval power.

Edward IV. made Portsmouth a strong place of defence, but the road from town only became well travelled in later centuries.

Along the old Portsmouth road were, and are still, any number of nautically named inns. At Liphook is the Anchor—where Pepys put up when on his way to England's chief naval town—and the Ship; there is another Anchor at Ripley; at Petersfield stands the Dolphin, and near Guildford is the Jovial Sailor. All these, and other signs of a like nature, suffice to tell the observant wayfarer that he is on the road which hordes of seamen have trod on their way to and from London, and that it was formerly deemed well worth while to hang out invitations to them.

In 1703 Prince George of Denmark made nine miles in six hours on this road, an indication that the good roads movement had not begun. In 1751 Doctor Burton suggested that all the animals in Sussex, including the women, were long-legged because of "the difficulty of pulling their feet out of the mud which covers the roads hereabouts."

A hundred or more years ago Nelson came by post by this road to Portsmouth to hoist his flag upon the Victory. He arrived at the George, the same which was sheltering our humble selves, at six in the morning, as the records tell, having travelled all night. The rest is history, but the old Victory still swings at her moorings in Portsmouth harbour, a shrine before which all lovers of the sea and its tales may worship. Portsmouth is the great storehouse of Britain's battleships, and the Solent from Spithead to Stokes Bay is a vast pool where float all manner of warlike craft.



The Isle of Wight was the immediate attraction for us at Portsmouth. One makes the passage by boat in thirty minutes, and when one gets there he finds leafy lanes and well-kept roads that will put many mainland counties to shame. The writer does not know the length of the roadways of the Isle of Wight, but there are enough to give one a good three days of excursions and promenades.

We made our headquarters at Ryde and sallied out after breakfast and after lunch each day, invariably returning for the night.



The beauties of the Isle of Wight are many and varied, with all the charms of sea and shore. For a literary shrine it has Tennyson's Freshwater and the Tennyson Beacon high up on the crest of the downs overlooking the Needles, Freshwater Bay, and the busy traffic of the English Channel, where the ships make landward to signal the observers at St. Catherine's Point.

Cowes and "Cowes week" are preeminent annual events in society's periodical swing around the circle.

The real development of Cowes, the home of the Royal Yacht Squadron, has been the evolution of week-end yachting in the summer months. City men, and jaded legislators, held to town by the Parliamentary duties of a long summer session, rush down to Southampton every Saturday and each steps off his train or motor-car on to the deck of his yacht, and then, after a spin westward to the Needles or eastward to the Nab or Warner Lightship, soothed by the lapping of the waters, and refreshed by the pure sea air, returns on the Monday to face again the terrors of London heat and "fag."

Taken all in all, we found the Isle of Wight the most enjoyable region of its area in all England. It is quite worth the trouble of crossing from the mainland with one's automobile in order to do it thoroughly; for what one wants is green fields and pastures new and a breadth of sea and sky.

Chapter III Land's End To John O'Groats



We had already done a bit of conventional touring in England, and we thought we knew quite all of the charms and fascinations of the idyllic countryside of most of Britain, not omitting even Ireland.

The cathedral towns had appealed to us in our youthful days, and we had rediscovered a good portion of Dickens's England on another occasion, had lived for a fortnight on a house-boat on the Thames, and had cruised for ten days on the Norfolk Broads, and besides had played golf in Scotland, and attempted to shoot grouse on a Scottish moor. All this had furnished at least variety, and, when it came to automobiling through Britain, it was merely going over well-worn ground that we had known in our cycling days, and usually we went merely where fancy willed.

Conditions had changed considerably, in fact all things had changed, we ourselves no less than certain aspects of the country which we had pictured as always being (in England) of that idyllic tenor of which the poet sings. This comes of living too much in London, and with too frequent week-ends at Brighton, Bournemouth, or Cromer.

For years, ever since we had first set foot in England in the days when cycling en tandem (and even touring in the same manner) was in vogue, if not the fashion, we had heard of John O'Groat's house, and we had seen Land's End many a time coming up Channel. We knew, too, that among scorching cyclists "Land's End to John O'Groat's" was a classic itinerary for those who would boast of their prowess and their grit.

All this passed and then came the automobile. "Land's End to John O'Groat's" is nothing for an automobile, though it is the longest straightaway bit of road in all Britain, 888 miles, to be exact. If you are out for a record on an automobile you do it as a "non-stop" run. It's dull, foolhardy business that, and it proves nothing except your ability to keep awake for anything between thirty-six and forty-eight hours, which you can do just as well sitting up with a sick friend.

In spite of the banal sound that the very words had for us, "Land's End to John O'Groat's" had a perennial fascination, and so we set out with our automobile to cover this much, talked of itinerary, with all its varied charms and deficiencies, for, taking it all in all, it is probably one of the hilliest roads in Britain, rising as it does over eight distinct ranges of what are locally called mountains, and mountains they virtually are when it comes to crossing them by road.



There is nothing very exciting to be had from a tour such as this, though it is nearly a nine hundred mile straight-away promenade. For the most part one's road lies through populous centres, far more so than any American itinerary for a reliability trial for automobiles that was ever conceived. Many are the "events" which have been run over this "Land's End—John O'Groat's" course, and the journey has proved the worth or worthlessness of many a new idea in automobilism.

The modern automobile is getting complicated, but it is also becoming efficient, if not exactly approaching perfection as yet. The early days of automobiling were not fraught with so many technicalities as to-day, when the last new thing may be a benzine bus or a turbine trailer; formerly everything was simple and crude,—and more or less inefficient. To-day many cars are as complicated as a chronometer and require the education of an expert who has lived among their intricacies for many months in order to control their vagaries and doctor their ills, which, if not chronic, are as varied as those of an old maid of sixty.

Four of us started on our road to the north as fit as possible, and we were courageous enough to think our automobile was likewise, as it was a tried and trusty friend with some twenty thousand miles to its credit, and with never a breakage so far as its mechanism was concerned.



We had stayed a few days at Penzance and got to knew something of Cornwall and things Cornish. Unquestionably Cornwall is the least spoiled section of Southern Britain; its coastline is rocky and serrated, and its tors and hills and rills are about as wild and unspoiled by the hand of man as can be imagined. There is a vast literature on the subject if one cares to read it, and the modern fictionists (like the painter-men) have even developed a "Cornish school." However, there need be no discussion of its merits or demerits here.

In Mount's Bay is the Cornish counterpart of Normandy's St. Michel's Mount. It is by no means so great or imposing, or endowed with such a wealth of architectural charm as the cross-channel Mont St. Michel, but the English St. Michael's Mount, a granite rock rising from the sea two hundred and fifty or more feet, was sufficient of an attraction to draw us to Penzance for our headquarters and to keep us till we had visited its castle of the days of Charles II. There is no question of the age of St. Michael's Mount, for Ptolemy charted it in Roman days, and the Roman warriors, who battled with the Britons, made spear-heads and hatchets of the tin and iron which they dug from its rocky defences.

The grim, unlovely little hotel at Land's End sheltered us the night before the commencement of our journey north, and the Longships Lighthouse flashed its warning in through our open bedroom window all the night long and made us dream of wicked and unworldly monster automobiles bearing down upon us with a great blazing phare which blotted out all else.

The nightmare passed, we got ourselves together at five in the morning, drank tepid tea, and ate the inevitable bacon and eggs furnished one for breakfast in England, and, before lunch, had passed Bodmin, crossed Bodmin moor (a little Exmoor), and skirted Dartmoor, just north of Great Links Tor, arriving at Exeter at high noon.

Pople's New London Hotel at Exeter is the headquarters of the Automobile Club, is patronized by Royalty (so the advertisements say), and is a very satisfactory-looking old-century inn which has not wholly succumbed to modern improvement, nor yet is it wholly backward. It is "fair to middling" only, so far as the requirements of the automobilist go (what Royalty may think of it the writer does not know), but its proprietor ought to take a trip abroad and find out what his house lacks.

The wonder of Exeter for us was the carved west porch of its cathedral, not very good carving, we were told, but undeniably effective, peopled as it was with a whole regiment of sculptured effigies.

Exeter has a ruined castle, too, called Rougement, a name which preserves the identity of its Norman origin. Exeter's High Street is a curious stagy affair, with great jutting house gables, pillars, and pignons, undeniably effective, but a terror to automobilists because of its narrowness and the congestion of its traffic.

The road turns north after leaving Exeter and passes Taunton, "one of the nicest towns in the west of England," as we were told by the landlord's daughter on leaving Exeter. Not knowing what her standard was for judgment, but suspecting it was tea and buns, we delved away into the county of Somerset and reached Wells, on the edge of the Mendip Hills, before dinner.

Somerset is reputed to be one of the loveliest counties in the west of England and one of the most countrified of all Britain. It is a region of farming lands, of big and little estates, with the big ones predominating, which the land reformers, and all others who give it a thought, claim must some day be divided among the people. When that millennium comes Somerset will be a paradise for the people. In spite of its productiveness and its suitability for farming, the great estates of the wealthy are used for the purposes of pleasure and not of profit, for the hunting of foxes and for the shooting of pheasants.

Wells is an episcopal city with a bishop who presides also over Bath. Wells is essentially ecclesiastical; never had it a momentous or warlike history; it is bare of romance; it has no manufactures and no great families. Wells Cathedral takes high rank for the originality of its architecture, its general constructive excellence, and its sculptures.



There are three picturesquely named hotels, the Swan, the Mitre, and the Star. They are all equally dull, respectable, and conservative, and they stick to tradition and conventional English fare. You will probably arrive on boiled-mutton night; we did, and suspect that it recurs about three times a week, but it was good mutton, though it would have been a great deal better roasted, instead of boiled.

Via Cheddar, where the cheeses come from, we made our way to Bristol. Bristol is one of the most progressive automobile towns in England. You may see all sorts and conditions of automobiles at Bristol, even American automobiles, which are more or less of a rarity in Europe, even in England.

From Bristol to Gloucester, another cathedral town, we passed over good roads and pleasant ones, rounding meanwhile the Cotswolds and passing direct to Worcester, where we lunched.

It is useless to attempt to describe a complete trip in pages such as these, and, beyond commenting on changing conditions and novel scenes, it is not attempted. Generally speaking the road surfaces were excellent throughout, but the grades of the hills were ofttimes abnormal, and the narrowness of main roads, and the hedge-hidden byroads which crossed them, made travelling more or less of a danger for the stranger, particularly if he was not habituated to England's custom of "meeting on the left and passing on the right."

Following the valley of the Severn, by Shrewsbury and Whitechurch, we crossed the great Holyhead Road, "the king's highway," from London to Holyhead.

From Ogilby's Road Book, an old book-stall find of one of our party at Shrewsbury, we learned that in days gone by the coach "Wonder" left the Bull and Mouth, at St. Martin's-le-Grand in London, at 6.30 A. M., and was at Shrewsbury at 10.30 the same night. Good going indeed for those days!

At Shrewsbury one is within easy reach of the Welsh border, but, in spite of the novelty promised us, we kept on our way north. This was not because we feared the "evil character" of the Welsh (as an old writer put it), but because we feared their language.

We left Liverpool and its docks, and Manchester and its cotton factories, to the left, and, passing through Warrington and Preston, arrived at Lancaster for the night. It was the longest day's driving we had done in England, something over two hundred miles. All the ordinary characteristics of the southern counties had been left far behind. The prettiness of conventional English scenery had made way for something more of character and severity of outline. For the morrow we had to look forward to the climb over Shap Fell, one of England's genuine mountain roads, or as near like one as the country has.

Lancaster was perhaps not the best place we could have chosen for the night, but everything had been running well and we had pushed on simply for the joy of the running. The County Hotel at Lancaster was like other county hotels in England. Verb. sap. They had the audacity to charge two shillings for housing our automobile for the night, and pointed out the fact that this was the special rate given members of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland.

Well! It was the most awful "roast" we found in England! They must have some grudge against the Club! "B. B. B." cost seven shillings and sixpence, and dinner four shillings more, a bottle of Bordeaux five shillings, etc. Four of us for the night (including a hot bath for each—which cost the hotel practically nothing) paid something like L3 for our accommodation. It wasn't worth it!

We passed the "Lake District" to the left the next morning, where it always rains, we are told. Perhaps it always does rain in some parts of Westmoreland, but it was bright and sunny when we crossed Shap Fell, at a height of something like twelve hundred feet above sea-level. The railway station of Shap Summit is itself at an elevation of a thousand feet. We had crossed nothing like this previously in England, although it is not so very high after all, nor is it so very terrifying in the ascent or descent. The Castle of Comfort Inn in the Mendip Hills was only seven hundred feet, but here we were five hundred feet above it, and the neighbouring Fells, Helvellyn and Scafell in particular, raised their regular, rounded peaks to something over thirty-two hundred feet in the air.

Carlisle is commonly called the border town between England and Scotland; at any rate it was a vantage-ground in days gone by that was of a great value to one faction and a thorn in the side to the other. The conquering and unconquered Scots are the back-bone of Britain, there's no denying that; and Carlisle is near enough to the border to be intimately acquainted with their virtues.

We inspected Carlisle's cathedral, its ugly castle, and the County Hotel,—and preferred the two former. One thing in Carlisle struck us as more remarkable than all else, and that was that the mean annual temperature was stated to be 48 deg. F. It was just that, when we were there, though cloudy and unpromising as to weather. In our opinion Carlisle is an unlovely, disagreeable place.

Gretna Green, with its famous, or infamous, career as a marriage mart, had little to offer a passing tourist beyond some silly, vulgar postcards on sale at a newsdealer's.

Across the border topographical characteristics did not greatly change, at least not at once, from what had gone immediately before, and it was not until Lockerbie was reached that we fully realized that we were in Scotland.

It was a long, long pull, and a hard, hard pull of seventy miles from Lockerbie to Edinburgh, via Moffat, Biggar, and Penicuik, skirting the Fells of Peebleshire and running close beneath the Pentland Hills, with memories of Stevenson's tales ever uppermost in our minds.

Via Dalkeith the entrance into Edinburgh is delightful, but via Rosslyn it is unbeautiful enough until one actually drops down into world-famed Princes' Street.

Romantic Edinburgh is known by European travellers as one of the sights never omitted from a comprehensive itinerary. It is quaint, picturesque, grand, squalid, and luxurious all rolled into one. Its castle crowns the height above the town on one side, and Arthur's Seat does the same on the other, with gloomy old Holyrood in the gulf between, the whole softened and punctuated with many evidences of modern life, the smoke and noise of railways, trams, and factories. There are many guide-books to Edinburgh, but there are none so satisfactory as Stevenson's tales dealing with the town. In "Kidnapped," "The Master of Ballantrae," and "Catriona," he pictures its old streets and "stairs," its historic spots, its very stones and flags, and the charming countryside around in incomparable fashion.

The Carlton Hotel at Edinburgh is the automobile hotel of Britain. There is nothing quite so good either in England or Scotland. The proof of this is that the Automobile Club de France have given it distinctive marks in its "Annuaire de l'Etranger." There is the tiny silhouette of a knife and fork, and four-poster bed, indicating that the tables and beds are of an agreeable excellence. This is a great deal more satisfying as a recommendation than Baedeker's.

We crossed the Firth of Forth via the Granton Ferry, from Granton to Burntisland,—pronounced Burnt Island—a fact that none of us knew previously.

Via Kinross and Loch Leven we arrived at Perth for lunch. We went to the Salutation Hotel, because of its celebrated "Prince Charlie Room," and had no reason to regret the lunch that was given us, or the price paid for it. Scottish hotels have had a reputation of not being as good as those of England and much more costly. We were finding things just the reverse. Automobilism is an industry in Scotland, not a fad, and the automobilist is catered for accordingly, at least so it seemed to us, and, since the leading British automobile is a Scotch production, who can deny that the Scot has grasped the salient points of the whole scheme of affairs in a far better manner than the Sassenach.

From Perth, through the very heart of the Scotch Highlands, we passed through Glen Garry and the Valley of the Spey. Cairn Gorm rose something over four thousand feet immediately on our right, when, turning abruptly northwest, we came into Inverness just at nightfall. It had been another long, hard day, and, since Perth, over indifferent roads.

The capital of the Highlands, Inverness, treated us very well at the Alexandra Hotel. As a summer or autumn resort Inverness has scarcely its equal in Britain. It is a lively, interesting, and picturesque town, and day lingers far on into the night by reason of its northern situation. Its temperature, moreover, for the most part of the year, is by no means as low as in many parts farther south.



From Inverness, via Dingwall, Tain, and Bonar Bridge, the roads improved, lying almost at sea-level. Here was a long sweep westward and then eastward again, around the Moray Firth, and it was not until we stopped at Helmsdale for lunch, 102 miles from Inverness, that we left the coastline road, and then only for a short distance.

Again at Berriedal we came to the coast, the surging, battering North Sea waves carving grimly every foot of the shore line. Lybster, Albster, and Thrumster were not even names that we had heard of previously, and we dashed through them at the legal limit, with only a glance of the eye at their quaintness and unworldliness.

Caithness is the most northern county of Scotland, and its metropolis is Wick, where one gets the nearest approach to the midnight sun that can be found with civilized, modern, and up-to-date surroundings.

The Scottish Automobile Club vouched for the accommodation of the Station Hotel, at Wick, and we had no occasion to question their judgment. (B. B. B., six shillings; which is cheap—though it costs you two shillings to stable your machine at a neighbouring garage.)

From Wick to John O'Groat's is thirty-six miles, out and back. We were all day doing it, loafing along over a heather-strewn plain and lunching at the Hotel Huna (the significance of which name we forgot to ask.)



This ended our run to the North, five days in all, not a very terrific speed or a very venturesome proceeding, but as good a test of one's knowledge of how to keep his machine running as can be got anywhere. It was a sort of rapid review of many things of which we had hitherto only a scrappy, fragmentary knowledge, and is a trip which should not be omitted from any one's grand European itinerary if one has the time and means of covering it.

Part IV In Belgium, Holland, And Germany

Chapter I On The Road In Flanders



There has been a noticeable falling off in touring in Belgium. There is no reason for this except the caprice of fashion, and the automobile and its popularizing influence will soon change all this, in spite of the abominable stretches of paved highroads, which here and there and everywhere, and most unexpectedly, crop up and shake one almost to pieces, besides working dire disaster to the mechanical parts of one's automobile. The authorities are improving things, but it will be some time yet before Belgium is as free from pave as is France.

The good roads of Belgium are as good as those anywhere to be found, and it is only the unlooked for and distressingly frequent stretches of paved highway which need give any concern.

The natives speak French—of a sort—here and there in Belgium, but they also speak Flemish and Walloon.

We left Paris by the Route de Belgique, crossed the frontier at Givet, and made our first stop at Rethel, 193 kilometres away, where we passed the night, at the Hotel de France. For a town of less than six thousand people Bethel is quite a metropolis. It has a grand establishment known as the Societe d'Automobiles Bauchet, which will cater for any and every want of the automobilist, and has a half-dozen sights of first rank, from the old Hotel Dieu to the bizarre doubled-up Eglise St. Nicolas and the seventeenth-century, wood-roofed market-house.

Sorbon, four kilometres away, is the birthplace of Robert Sorbon, the founder of the Sorbonne at Paris, and is a classic excursion which is never omitted by true pilgrims who come to Rethel.

Fifty-three kilometres from Rethel is Rocroi, a name which means little to most strangers in France. It is near the Belgian frontier and saw bloody doings in the Franco-Prussian war.

Rocroi is a pompous little fortified place reached only by one road and a narrow-gauge railway—literally two streaks of iron rust—which penetrate up to the very doors of a pretentious Hotel de Ville with a Doric facade, and not much else that is remarkable.

The town has a population of but two thousand, is surrounded by fortifications, contains a Caserne, a Sous-Prefecture, a Prison, and a Palais de Justice. All this officialdom weights things down considerably, and, what with the prospect of the custom-house arrangements at Givet, and the necessity of demonstrating to an over-zealous gendarme at Rocroi that we really had a "Certificat de Capacite," and that the photograph which it bore (which didn't look the least like us) was really ours, we were considerably angered and delayed on our departure the next morning, particularly as we had already been three days en route and the frontier was still thirty odd kilometres away.

As one passes Rocroi, Belgium and France blend themselves into an indistinguishable unit so far as characteristics go. Manners and customs here change but slowly, and the highroad must be followed many kilometres backward toward Paris before one gets out of the influence of Flemish characteristics.

We finally got across the Belgium frontier at Givet, at least we got our passavant here, though the Belgian customs formalities took place at Heer-Agimont, formalities which are delightfully simple, though evolving the payment of a fee of twelve per cent. of the declared value of your automobile. You get your receipt for money paid, which you present at the frontier station by which you leave and get it back again—if you have not lost your papers. If you have you might as well prepare to live in Belgium the rest of your life, as a friend of ours told us he had done, when we met him unexpectedly on a cafe terrace at Ostende a week later.

There be those who are content to grovel in dark alleys, among a sordid picturesqueness, surrounded by a throng of garlic-sodden natives, rather than while their time away on the open mountainside or wide-spread lake or plain. All such are advised to keep away from Southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and the valley of the Meuse at Dinant and Namur.

We lunched at the Hotel des Postes at Dinant on the Meuse, and so lovely was the town and its environs, and the twenty-eight kilometres of valley road to Namur (no pave here), that it took us eight hours of a long summer's day to get away from Dinant and get settled down again for the night in the Hotel d'Harscamp at Namur.

The native declares there is nothing to equal the view from the fortress-height of the citadel of Namur, neither in Switzerland nor the Pyrenees; but though we climbed the three twisting kilometres to the fort, there was nothing more than a ravishing view of the charming river valley at our feet. The majesty of it all was in the imagination of the inhabitant, but all the same it was of a loveliness that few artists can describe in paint, few authors picture in words, and no kodakist reproduce satisfactorily in print. There is but one thing for the curious to do, and that is to go and see it for himself.

The rest of the journey across Belgium to Brussels the writer would like to forget. Oh, that terrible next day! Sixty kilometres of one of the worst and most destructive roads, for an automobile, in Europe, and through a most uninteresting country. Perhaps, if the road had been better, the landscape might not have had so oppressive an effect. As it was, an automobilist journeys along the road—which is practically across the kingdom—his eyes glued to it, his heart in his mouth, and he bumps and slides over the wearying kilometres until he all but forgets the beauties of the Meuse now so far behind. Kilometre after kilometre of this vile road is paved with blocks of stone as big as one's head, half of which are out of place. And when one's automobile sinks into the holes one can but shudder. One hears of a road that is paved with good intentions. It does not enjoy a good reputation, but it can't be worse than the road from Namur to Brussels!

We passed through what, for the want of a better and more distinctive name, may be called the Waterloo region; but, for the moment, we cared not a jot for battle-fields. Our battle with the ugly roads of Belgium was all-sufficient.

Southey's verses are so good, though, that they are here given in order that the writer may arrive the quicker at Brussels and take his well-earned rest:

"Southward from Brussels lies the field of blood, Some three hours' journey for a well-girt man; A horseman who in haste pursued his road Would reach it as the second hour began. The way is through a forest deep and wide, Extending many a mile on either side."

"No cheerful woodland this of antique trees, With thickets varied and with sunny glade; Look where he will, the weary traveller sees One gloomy, thick impenetrable shade Of tall straight trunks, which move before his sight, With interchange of lines of long green light."

"Here, where the woods receding from the road Have left on either hand an open space For fields and gardens, and for man's abode, Stands Waterloo; a little lowly place, Obscure till now, when it hath risen to fame, And given the victory its English name."

Finally we reached Brussels, still over cobblestones, the road growing worse every minute, and stopped at the Grand Central Hotel, in the Place de la Bourse, the correspondent of the Touring Club de France, and the only hotel of its class which serves its table d'hote "vin compris."

Brussels has ever been put down in the notebooks of conventional travellers as a little Paris; but this is by no means the case. It resembles Paris not at all, except that French francs pass current in its shops and the French tongue is the language of commerce and society.

What has less frequently been remarked is that Brussels has two contrasting elements of life, which, lying close, one upon the other, strongly exaggerate the French note of it all, and make the hotels, cafes, restaurants, etc., take on that boulevard aspect which we fondly think is Parisian.

French Brussels and Flemish Brussels are as distinct elements in the make-up of this doubleheaded city as are the ingredients of oil and water, and like the latter they do not mix.

When one descends from the hilltop on which is modern Brussels, past the cathedral of Ste. Gudule, he leaves the shops, the cafes, and the boulevards behind him and enters the past.

The small shopmen, and the men and women of the markets, all look and talk Flemish, and the environment is everywhere as distinctly Flemish as if one were standing on one of the little bridges which cross the waterways of Ghent or Bruges.

The men and women are broad-bodied and coarse-featured,—quite different from the Dutch, one remarks,—and they move slowly and with apparent difficulty in their clumsy sabots and heavy clothing. The houses round about are tall and slim, and mostly in that state of antiquity and decay which we like to think is artistic.

Such is Flemish Brussels. Even in the Flemish part, the city has none of that winsome sympathetic air which usually surrounds a quaint mediaeval bourg. Rather it gives one the impression that old traditions are all but dead and that it is mere improvidence and laisser-aller that allows them to exist.

Flemish Brussels is picturesque enough, but it is squalid, except for the magnificent Hotel de Ville, which stands to-day in all the glory that it did when Charles V. of Spain ruled the destinies of the country.

It was in the square in front of the Hotel de Ville that Alva gloated over the flowing blood of his victims as it ran from the scaffold.

The churches of Brussels, as might be supposed from the historical importance of the city in the past, are numerous and celebrated, at least they are characteristically Flemish in much of their belongings, though the great cathedral of Ste. Gudule itself is Gothic of the unmistakable French variety.

Brussels, its cathedrals, its Hotel de Ville, its Cloth Hall, and its Corporation or Guild Houses, and many more splendid architectural sites and scenes are all powerful attractions for sightseers.

We went from Brussels to Ghent, forty-eight kilometres, and still over pave. The bicyclist is better catered for, he has cinder side-paths almost all over Belgium and accordingly he should enjoy his touring in occidental and oriental Flanders even more than the automobilist.

Ghent was one day a seaport of rank, much greater rank than that of to-day, for only a sort of sea-going canal-boat, a chaland or a caboteur, ever comes up the canals to the wharves.

Ghent is a great big town, but it does not seem in the least like a city in spite of its hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Its churches, its belfry, its chateau, and its museum are the chief sights for tourists—automobilists and others. We visited them all after lunch, which was eaten (and paid for at Paris prices) at the Hotel de la Poste, and covered another forty-six kilometres of pave, before we turned in for the night at Bruges' Hotel du Sablon. There are others, but the Hotel du Sablon at Bruges was modest in its price, efficient in its service, and excellent in its catering. The chief delicacy of the menu here is the mossel. One eats mussels (mossels) in Belgium—if he will—and it's hard for one to escape them. They are moules in France, mossels in Belgium and Holland, and mussels in England. They are a sea food which has never tickled the American palate; but, after many refusals and much resentment, we ate them—and found them good.

Bruges' sights are similar to those of Ghent, except that its belfry is more splendid and more famous and the Memlings of the Hopital St. Jean draw crowds of art lovers to Bruges who never even stop at Ghent.

Our little run around Belgium, a sort of willy-nilly blowing about by the North Sea winds, drew us next to Ostende. If there is one place more splendidly chic than Ostende it is Monte Carlo. The palm is still with Monte Carlo, but, for August at any rate, Ostende, with its Digue, its hotels and terrace cafes and restaurants, is the very glass of fashion and fashionables.

It was only on entering Ostende, over the last few kilometres of the road from Bruges, just where it borders the Slykens Canal, that we met anything deserving to be called a good road since leaving the neighbourhood of Namur. The roads of Belgium served a former generation very well, but tempus fugit, and the world advances, and really Belgium's highways are a disgrace to the country.