house as if he were in his own. Whereas at a tavern there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."

Hear, hear! say I; but while on the subject of inns may remark that I have been much disappointed in my ramblings; in truth began some six years too late from this point of view. For in that interval the country has been deprived of many of its finest examples of this hospitable sort of architecture. Of those fine examples-few and far between-which still remain, many are now sinking into a state of irremediable disrepair-witness the great inn at Stilton for one—and will in the near fulness of time doubtless be improved altogether off the face of the earth.

Some of these meanwhile on these direct roads of England which I have up to now treated of, have been preserved by a sympathetic artist's pencil, and the thought is so satisfactory a one that I propose to bestow on three other inns--not on the main roads, but magnificent houses still, the same enviable fate.

At Norton St. Philip, then, in Somersetshire, seven miles south-east of Bath, there still stands in the George Inn, a half-timbered, fifteenth century house, of the finest possible type. Monmouth passed the night of June 26th, 1685, at this George. He watched a skirmish between his outposts and Feversham's from the windows of the inn, was shot at while standing there for his pains, and marched upon Frome next day. At Glastonbury, in the same county, an inn of the same name-the Georgewith front one splendid mass of panelling, pierced where necessary for windows, the finest piece of domestic work

in one of the most entrancing towns in England from an antiquary's point of view, dates from the fourth Edward; while, to go further afield for a fine specimen of a different period, at Scole in Suffolk, the White Hart, erected in 1655 by John Peck, merchant, of Norwich, still retains some fine carving, and had till the end of the last century an enormous sign containing many figures-Diana and Acteon, Charon, Cerberus and sundry other worthies, carved in wood by Fairchild, at a cost of £1057.

Such splendid monuments of road-travelling as these may fitly round this disjointed story of England's Coaching Days and Ways. In looking back over many miles covered and many incidents missed I find little cause for self-congratulation, save the fact that I have at least kept to my programme. I have traversed an obscure period. carefully on well beaten tracks, and to my pioneers' assistance I hope I have always made due acknowledgment. To give an accurate, a statistical record of the prime age of coaching has been in most cases their object, and they have in most cases attained to it. If a minor measure of success attends my enterprise I shall be content-content, that is to say, if I have caught some flavour of the romance of the Great Roads of England from the time when the Flying Machine of Charles the Second's age lumbered out of the Belle Sauvage Yard, up to the day when the Holyhead Mail vid Shrewsbury, timed at eleven miles an hour, was our fathers' wonder, and the pride of this perfect road-" Mr. Bicknell's spicy team of greys."

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