ling, gorse and furze on each side the margin of the road as far as the eye could reach. In due course Margaret Tudor arrived in Edinburgh, August 2nd, and was married August 8th, 1503.

Here is a picture of medieval travel such as I think must have often been witnessed from the windows of such old houses of entertainment as the Bell at Stilton, when the Tudors ruled England. And often sterner episodes of history must have passed beneath its magnificent copper sign than wedding processions of royal princesses, even in those days, when England was called merry, and was merry England indeed. During the year

1536 the Bell at Stilton was no doubt often visited by one of those medley cavalcades so common at the time, consisting of abbots in full armour, waggon-loads of victuals, oxen and sheep, and a banner borne by a retainer on which was worked a plough, a chalice and a Host, a horn, and the five wounds of Christ-the well-known badge which marked the fiery course of the Pilgrimage of Grace. This great rising which began in Lincolnshire ran much of its course along the Great North Roadwho knows how much of it passed through the nowdeserted rooms and corridors of the great Northern inns such as this Bell at Stilton! It was in an inn at Lincoln

at all events that on a night of October there was present a gentleman of Yorkshire whose name (Robert Aske) a few weeks later was ringing through every English household in accents of terror or admiration.

But indeed standing before such a monument of days gone by as this is, it is not a question of this or that romantic episode rising to a fanciful man's mind as the pageant of a whole nation's history passing in a sort of ghostly procession. And what episode of that pageant, or of such part of it at all events as passed on the Great North Road, has not this great deserted house of entertainment seen, fed, sheltered within its now crumbling walls? Gallants of Elizabeth's day, Cavaliers of Charles the First's, Ironsides on their way to Marston Moor, Restoration Courtiers flying from the Plague. And in days more modern, King's messengers spurring to London with the tidings of Culloden-and Cumberland himself fresh from his red victory, and the long line of Jacobite prisoners passing in melancholy procession, their arms pinioned behind them, each prisoner's horse led by a foot soldier carrying a musket with fixed bayonet; each division preceded by a troop of horse with drawn swords, the drums insulting the unhappy prisoners by beating a triumphal march in derision.

Why, scenes beyond number such as these must have passed before the long gabled front of this old Bell at Stilton; passed, faded, been succeeded by hundreds more stirring, which in their turn too vanished like some halfremembered dream. And the old house still seems to keep some mysterious memory of these scenes locked in its old withered heart; as gaunt, ghost-like, deserted, but half alive, it stares night and day on the lonely North Road.

A Quaint Bay, St. Albans.

VII. THE HOLYHEAD ROAD.

THE history of the New and Direct Road to Holyhead by St. Albans, Redbourn, Dunstable, Brick-hill, Towcester, Dunchurch, Coventry, Birmingham, and thence to Shrewsbury, begins, as I read its record, two hundred years before the Holyhead Mail showed fair claim to be one of the fastest coaches in England, or the Shrewsbury Wonder's supreme punctuality regulated the watches of dwellers on the roadside. It is true that in November, 1605, roads as we now understand them did not exist; but this same route, or at all events tracks across uninclosed heaths, even then connected the above-mentioned places with each other and the capital, and marked the

shortest way for those riding post to reach Northamptonshire, or the counties beyond its borders.

Early then in the November of 1605, certain elaborate preparations which had been made for rapid travelling between London and Dunchurch, eighty miles down. in Warwickshire, was the common talk of ostlers and loafers at the chief posting-houses at St. Albans, Dunstable, Towcester, and Daventry. At each of these places a Mr. Ambrose Rookwood, a young Catholic gentleman of fortune, well known on the road for his splendid horses, had placed heavy relays. The heaviness of these relays excited continual discussion. The confused rumour of the tap-room, fed by chance travellers on the road, decreed presently that these heavy relays were to carry Mr. Ambrose Rookwood down to a great hunting party, to be shortly assembled at Dunsmoor. But when this hunting party was to take place, no one seemed to know, or why the young Catholic gentleman should have made such elaborate preparations to reach it so hurriedly.

And so the few intervening days passed till the 5th of November, 1605, dawned grayly over London-amidst torrents of driving rain and wild gusts of a west wind which had gathered strength as the night waned, and by daylight had grown into a hurricane-dawned on a city distracted. Narrow streets were already crowded with excited groups, who whispered, gesticulated, at street corners. Some men but half dressed rushed from their houses as if the rumour of some monstrous imminent doom had startled them suddenly from sleep. Others with drawn swords in their hands counselled all men to arm in one breath, and, as now and again a woman's shriek rose above the press cried in another, that there was no cause for fear. Consternation was everywhere, -but no fixed rumour prevailed. Only each man eyed his neighbour suspiciously, only a vague feeling as of some nightmare had seized upon London that the past darkness had brought forth a portent.

In the dim twilight of that November dawn Mr. Ambrose Rookwood, the young Catholic gentleman, whose relays of fine horses had excited such discussion on the North-western Road-came out into these dis

tracted streets, in company with a friend-one Mr. Thomas Winter. The two gentlemen walked aimlessly here and there for some time, listening attentively to all that was said on all sides, now joining themselves to a group and adding questions on their own part, to the

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