"Never buy a horse from a rich man who hunts, or from a poor man till you have tried him." "Never believe a word any man says about a horse he wishes to sell--not even a bishop." "Never refuse a good dinner from home, unless you have a better at home." "Never keep a drinking man--nor a very pretty maid-servant." Most of the successful conduct of life could be secured by careful obedience to these five counsels. Paterson's was by no means the first road-book; but it is the best. Mr. Bemerton showed me the other day _Ogilvy's_, a delightful series of copper-plates, fourth edition, dated 1753. Every word in it is engraved, which makes reading sometimes a little difficult, but the effort is worth making. The great charm of the book is that all the journeys start from London, and the road is pictured the whole way. Every mile is marked. Thus the journey from London to Berwick, 260 computed and 339 measured miles, takes ten pages of three columns each. Nothing is needed but gradients and a few technical particulars to make it still perfect for the motorist. It would be an agreeable task to bring one of these books into line with the present day of machinery and petrol,--agreeable, although tinged with melancholy. CHAPTER XV MR. DUCKIE, WITH HIS NAPKIN ON HIS ARM, SUGGESTS A SCHEME FOR HUMAN HAPPINESS To-day I carried out my promise of lunching at the Golden Horn and testing the quality not only of the house's famous saddle, but also of Mr. Duckie's skill as a waiter. He had reserved a corner seat in one of the pews, and had evidently given orders to his assistant that I was to be well looked after: an agreeable attention, but carrying with it the necessary corollary, in an English eating-house, that other guests were neglected. I was amused by a father and son who occupied the same compartment. This father was evidently of the Temple--a man of about fifty, and intensely proud of his son, a youth from Oxford, who, however, no matter what learning his head might hold, was too callow to fancy exhibitions of paternal interest--young enough to be self-conscious and vigilant as to form, and even, I am afraid, the least little bit in doubt as to his father's satisfactoriness as a judge of life. He would grow out of such foibles, I think, for he had a good face. The core of the little comedy lay in the father's desire to let me, a stranger, into the secret of his son's success. He stood sufficiently in fear of the boy to refrain from talking to me about him, or indeed talking to me at all. Young Oxford, he knew instinctively, would not like that, and the honest fellow, who was clearly of a sociable communicative cast, with a very agreeable vein of naïve snobbishness, had to content himself by making such remarks to his son as carried important information with them.