Although, by an early Act of William III.’s reign, the justices were ordered to erect guideposts at the cross-roads, and road surveyors were to be fined 10s. if the provisions of the Act were not complied with, such posts (except perhaps on the road to Harwich, so often travelled by the Third William on his journeys to and from the Continent) were conspicuously lacking for many generations yet to come, and no one ever seems to have heard of country surveyors being fined for not performing the duty thus laid upon them. An exception to this picture of an uncharted wilderness thus presented is found in the diary of Celia Fiennes, who in the last decade of the seventeenth century travelled through England on horseback, and especially remarked the Lancashire cross-roads between Wigan and Preston being furnished with “hands pointing to each road, with ye names of ye great towns on.” The fact of her thinking the circumstance worth noting shows us how uncommon it was for roads to be signposted. Only the waggoners who constantly used the roads could with certainty find their way; and so, and for fear of the highwaymen and the footpads and other hedgerow rascals to whom the smallest plunder was not despicable, the waggon was a welcome friend to the poor. Safety was thought to lie in numbers; although it is true that, in the moment of trial, even a waggonful of able-bodied travellers would commonly surrender their few valuables to the first demand of a single highwayman, whose pistol was probably unloaded, and, even if primed, generally refused to “go off” when fired. It is not unnatural to prefer to be robbed in company with a number of others, rather than to be the solitary victim. For these reasons, therefore, even the able-bodied and unencumbered often chose to tediously travel with the women, the infirm, and those whose luggage compelled. Smollett’s humorous description of the stage-waggon and the follies and foibles of its very mixed passengers is the classic authority for this stratum of road life. The sham captain, really a quondam valet, braggart before the timorous, but shaking with the fear of death upon him when the pretended highwayman appears; his wife, aping a gentility as mean as it is transparently false; the money-loving and peace-loving but satirical Jew; the lively Miss Jenny, and the waggoner, are all types, slightly caricatured, but true to the life of the period. Putting aside the question as to whether such people could be conjured out of his inner consciousness without some basis of fact, we must consider that Smollett, writing of his own time, would not for his own sake be likely to draw a picture which would seem a forced or unnatural representation of the wayfaring life of the period. Thus, when he makes his characters journey for five days in this manner, and brings them on the sixth to an inn where the landlord gives the meal they had bespoken to three gentlemen who had just arrived, we think we learn something of the