Abbot's Bromley struck me as a very pleasant and picturesque little place; it has no railway, and that is perhaps why it has such an old-fashioned look. I have always a liking for these little towns beyond railways. Most of its houses, built long years ago, are of black and white half-timber; and the ancient inn there is of half-timber too, that with its grey gables, its casement windows, its swinging sign, is suggestive of the coaching and Pickwickian days and all the lost romance of them. It took my fancy. It ought to have some story to tell of those "good old times," but I failed to find or to conjure one; for though the house remains much as it was, the actors are dead and gone--host, coach-farer, and highwayman. It is the sort of inn you read of in Harrison Ainsworth's novels, though I doubt if any one reads them to-day. How rich in incident and picturesque description they are! I know I took my fill of them when I was a boy; now, alas! they have lost much of their flavour; yet they have changed not, the change must be in me. To complete the old-world picture of the place, Abbot's Bromley boasts of an ancient roofed-in Market Cross, with thick oak supporting-posts around. Only compare the sought-for picturesqueness of a model garden city with the natural unsought-for picturesqueness of such old towns as Abbot's Bromley, and oh, the difference! I left the little, forgotten town basking, but not sleeping, in the sunshine, for it was much alive and making merry that day. We had not gone far before a change came over the weather--I hope the open-air bazaar did not suffer from it. Overhead the sky grew dark and threatening, then came a sudden flash of lightning, loud thunder followed, then the rain in torrents. I wondered whether a motor-car with all its metal work was the safest place to be in, for the storm was severe; but there was nothing for it but to drive on, with such uncertain assurance as the saying of the farmer at Wem afforded that "lightning never strikes a moving object." In spite of that comforting dictum lightning is not to be trusted. Since then I have heard that a motor-car travelling on the road has been struck by lightning, and, though fortunately no one was hurt, the car was damaged. How the rain hissed down, and how the wind howled through and shook the trees, even blowing bits of their branches and leaves across the road! Still above the sound of the storm I could hear the steady beat of our pistons, as one hears the reassuring throb of the engines of a steamer in a gale at sea.