When Smollett, the novelist, travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh and on to London as a young man, in 1739, he rode pack-horse as far as Newcastle, for the simple reason that between Glasgow and the Tyne there was neither coach, cart, nor waggon on the road; and in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Devon and Cornwall, and the like extreme corners of the land, where remoteness from the world and the rugged nature of the country conspired to exclude wheels, the packman and his small but sturdy breed of laden horses alone kept the rural districts supplied with their barest requirements until the first years of the nineteenth century were come. The old packmen’s and drovers’ ways, narrow and winding to avoid the turnpike-gates that once took toll of all but the foot-passenger, may still be traced on the Yorkshire wolds, along the shoulders of the Westmorland and Cumberland fells, and by the rivers and moors of Devon and Cornwall. Often they are not even lanes, but only precipitous and rocky tracks, eloquent of those old times that are commonly pictured so rosy, but were really very grey and dour. Here and there the sign of the “Pack Horse” still survives, and marks the old houses of entertainment once frequented by the packmen of that vanished past. The “Pack Horse” at Chippenham and those two old houses at Turnham Green, the “Old Pack Horse” and the “Pack Horse and Talbot” were halting-places of the packmen who travelled the Bath Road. The last-named house is now little more than an ordinary London “public,” but it still displays a picture-sign, copied from an old original, showing a pack-horse with a talbot by his side; the “talbot” being the old English hound, something between a foxhound and a bloodhound, a fierce creature who guarded his master’s property from the thieves and dangers of all kinds that then befell so constantly along the roads, or even at the often ill-famed inns by the wayside.