I have a coachman who has been in the family for seventy-five years, and is one of the last surviving representatives of the all-but-extinct race of Caleb Balderstone. This old man remembers the state of the country before most of the new roads were made, before Macadam's system was introduced, and very curious stories he can tell of the old roads, and the travelling thereon. Formerly the roads were--not exactly paved, but made by the thrusting of big stones into holes which they more or less adequately filled. Then on top of all were put smaller stones, picked up from the fields, and not broken at all. As I have got the old road near my gates, for about a mile, closed to all but foot-passengers--though the maps persist in attempting to send carriages over it--I can see exactly what they were. This bit of road is cut between banks eight and nine feet high, has been sawn through soil and rock by the traffic of centuries, assisted by streams of water in winter. The floor is a series of rocky steps, and I can recall when these steps were eased to the traveller by the heaping of boulders on them producing a rude slope. But as with every heavy rain a rush of water went down this road, it dislodged the boulders, and woe betide the horse descending the steep declivity of loosely distributed rolling stones on an irregular and fragile stair of slates. My great-great-grandmother had a famous black bull. The contemporary Duke of B., who was a fancier of cattle, wanted to buy it, but madam refused to sell. Again he sent over, offering double what he had offered before, but was again refused. Then said the Duke, "Tell madam, that if she will sell me that bull, I will gallop my horse down the road without saddle or bridle." She sent him the bull as a present, without exacting the ride, which would have in all likelihood cost him his life. In old novels the sinking of the wheel of a chaise in a mud-hole, or the breakage of the carriage, is an ordinary and oft-recurring incident. The wonder to me is, that chaises ever made any progress over these old roads without being splintered to atoms. How was it that china, glass, mirrors, ever reached the country houses intact? I applied to my coachman. [Illustration: Packman's Way by a River-side.]