Miss Strong, on consulting her watch, decided that her party might safely indulge in a halt of half an hour, and ordered tea for nine persons. The inn, built on a type common in the district, was entered by an archway leading straight into a courtyard. A door on the right led to the bar, and a door on the left to the coffee-room. To this latter more aristocratic quarter Miss Strong conducted her pupils. Some of them had never before been in a small village hostelry, and were much amused at the quaint old parlor with its sporting prints, its glass cases of stuffed squirrels and badgers, and its horsehair-seated chairs with crochet antimacassars hung over the backs. The atmosphere was certainly rather redolent of stale beer and tobacco, but a bunch of crimson wall-flowers on the table did their best to spread a pleasant perfume. The tea, when, after much delay, it arrived, was delicious. The Pelican was a farm as well as an inn, and the rosy-faced servant girl carried in cream, fresh butter, and red-currant jam to the coffee-room. She apologized for the absence of cake, but it was an omission that nobody minded. Upland air gives good appetites, and, though Miss Strong reminded her flock that this was only a meal by the way, and that supper was ordered for them at Dropwick, they set to work as if they would taste nothing more till midnight. There was something so delightfully fresh and out of the common in having tea at a wayside inn; they felt true pilgrims of the road, and civilization and school seemed to have faded into a far background. The love of travel is in the blood of both Celt and Anglo-Saxon; our forefathers visited shrines for the joy of the journey as well as for religious motives, and maybe our Bronze Age ancestors, who flocked to the great Sun Festivals at Stonehenge or Avebury Circles, derived pleasure from the change of scene as well as a blessing from the Druids. The Romans, those great pioneers of travel, had opened out the district eighteen centuries ago, and laid a straight, paved road from Wendcester to Pursborough; the remains of their fortified camps and of their villas were still left to mark their era. The foss-way, leading from Ryton-on-the-Heath to Dropwick, was their handiwork, and our pilgrims were to march on the identical track of some old Roman legion. It must be owned that when tea was finished they were very unwilling pilgrims, and would gladly have spent the night at The Pelican and have slept in the funny, musty, low-ceiled little bedrooms upstairs. "Couldn't we possibly stop here?" implored Verity. But Miss Strong, having booked rooms in Dropwick, was adamant.