This road, with its wayside oaks and strips of green, was not, as might be imagined, a quiet country lane, but a highway full of life and colour and movement. Here, past the court gates, and in full view from the first-floor windows of the house, flowed by throughout the summer months a ceaseless stream of traffic. The smocked carriers cracked their whips as they passed with their covered waggons and long train of patient packhorses, or shouted to the women passengers crouching behind them in the straw. Postboys with budgets of letters cantered by, sounding their horns as they turned down to the village. Beggars in rags, with their little bundles carried upon staves across the shoulder, and wandering pipers and fiddlers, turned to look at the house; Scotch pedlars, with cheap linen cloth in their packs; and hawkers or chapmen with wallets full of little trifles—gloves of cordevant and sheep leather, tobacco boxes, ribbons and shoe-strings, almanacs, horn-books, jocktalegs, and ballads on the Dutch war and the hearth tax. Gentlemen in long boots, riding suits and cloaks, and velvet caps, trotted past, followed by mounted servants; or honest yeomen in coarse cloth and worsted stockings, with their wives in homespun and steeple hats riding pillion behind them. The little processions of marketing and fairing folk came and went; brown barefooted mower-women at hay and corn harvest; labourers in their loose frocks tied in at the waist, patched breeches and hose, and tall hats with vast projecting brims; country women riding to market between baskets of farm produce, with chickens or ducks swinging from the saddlebow; labourers’ wives trudging it on foot with wicker trays of vegetables or fruit upon their heads; farmers’ wains drawn by huge oxen, older and bulkier than any which can be seen to-day; and, in autumn, droves of swine on their way to the woods. Often Lord Frecheville’s or Lord Deincourt’s chariot and four passed the gates, the coach of some neighbouring gentleman bright with heraldry and gilding, a train of charcoal waggons bringing fuel to the Staveley ironworks, or of others laden with long saws and brewers’ squares, cannon shot, fire-backs, or sugar-stoves; and more rarely a ponderous furnace-hearth drawn by twenty oxen, a company of militia in their buffcoats faced with crimson plush, a gentleman riding to the poll at Derby at the head of his tenantry, or the cavalcade of some great nobleman journeying towards London with three coaches and an armed escort of thirty or forty attendants on horseback. It was an ever changing panorama of human life, an endless procession labouring towards an unknown goal, for in the seventeenth century the nation was to be studied rather on the roads than in the cities, and for commerce, for travel, and for news, the roads were all that the railways and telegraphs are to us, and more. [Illustration: Arrival of a Guest at a Country House.]