We came from Basle to London in 1869 in six-and-twenty hours, and in 1913 I came in fourteen hours. There were neither dining-cars nor sleeping-cars in 1869, nor were there any corridor-carriages, but only the old style of carriage that jolted one abominably. Yet my father kept talking of the speed and comfort of the train, for he was thinking of the journey in the diligence. I got little sympathy from him, when I felt tired in a train; and I have little sympathy with people who complain of travelling now. In fact, I sometimes feel a little jealous of their seeing things so easily that I saw only with trouble and discomfort. They have railways and hotels all over Greece; and, when I went there first in 1880, there were no hotels except at Athens, and no railways except from Athens to Peiræus, a distance of about five miles. But there was a pleasant way of travelling that is unknown to them. When I first went to Holland in 1872, we travelled along the canals in a Trekschuit, a light barge drawn by two or three horses, tandem, that went along the tow-path at a trot. The seats were put up high enough to clear the banks of the canal; and you saw the country comfortably, as you went gliding through. They have only motors now. These barges were formerly in use in Belgium also; and I found these entries in one of the old diaries here:--“25 July 1833. Dunkirk. By barge to Bruges.... Changed barges at Furnes, the Belgian frontier.... Changed barges again at Nieuport.... 27 July 1833. Bruges. Embarked in a superb barge, called the Lion, and drawn by five horses. It had carried Napoleon.... Arrived at Ghent in the evening.” A steamboat was nicer than a diligence; and that really was the reason why people were always going up the Rhine. It was much the easiest way of getting to Switzerland and Italy. Going by the Rhine in 1855, my father notes that it was the seventeenth time that he had gone that way, either up or down the stream. That time he had his father with him, and chafed a little at the leisurely movements of the previous generation. But he never wished for anything more rapid than the steamboat on the Rhine, whereas I have found it tedious, and gone up by the train. * * * * * Looking at old diaries, I see that the cost of travelling on the Continent has varied very little in the last seventy or eighty years. There has been a decrease in the cost of transit; but this is counterbalanced by an increase in the charge for bedrooms. It used to be absurdly low; but the rooms were often very poor and sparsely furnished even at the best hotels. The charge for meals at table d’hôte remains about the same.