It has been remarked by not unfriendly critics that the author of these quiet meditations seems to live a good deal in the past, and people in whom the chronological sense is missing are apt to think me a great deal older than I am. Thus when I have recalled among my earliest recollections the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre (in 1856), I have been thought to be babbling of Drury Lane, which was burnt down in 1812; and so, when I say that in early life I travelled a great deal upon the Road, I shall probably be accused of having been born before railways were invented. What is true enough is that a prejudice against railways lingered long after they were in general use; some people thought them dangerous, some undignified, and I believe that there were some who even thought them wicked because they are not mentioned in the Bible. "I suppose you have heard of Lady Vanilla's trip from Birmingham?" says Lady Marney in "Sybil." "Have you not, indeed? She came up with Lady Laura, and two of the most gentlemanlike men sitting opposite her; never met, she says, two more intelligent men. She begged one of them at Wolverhampton to change seats with her, and he was most politely willing to comply with her wishes, only it was necessary that his companion should move at the same time, for they were chained together--two gentlemen sent to town for picking pockets at Shrewsbury races." "A Countess and a felon!" said Lord Mowbray. "So much for public conveyances." To these social perils were added terrors of tunnels, terrors of viaducts, terrors of fires which would burn you to an ash in your locked carriage, terrors of robbers who were supposed to travel first-class for the express purpose of chloroforming well-dressed passengers and then stealing their watches. Haunted by these and similar fears, some old-fashioned people travelled by road till well into the 'sixties. From my home in the South Midlands we took a whole day in getting to London, forty miles off; two to Leamington, three to Winchester; and those who still travelled in this leisurely mode were the last patrons of the Inn.