But Marian Evans had, you see, her limitations as a diviner of things to be. Electricity was not within her ken; she did not suspect the steam-carriages of her youth would be reincarnated as modern motor-cars. Yet, all the time, they were simply laid by, and Gurney, Hancock, and their fellows are justified in this our day. Everything recurs, essentially the same as before, with a complete revolution of the wheel of time, and thus the Road has become itself again. Will a time come when the day of the motor-car will be looked back upon with that air of regretful sentiment with which the vanished Coaching Age is regarded? The rhythmic footfall of the horses and the rattle of the bars, the tootling of the “yard of tin” and the cheerful circumstance that attends the progress of a well-appointed coach, are things which have been, and may still be, experienced in our time by those who journey down the roads affected by the summer coaches, to Brighton, St. Albans, and Virginia Water; but as the Coaching Age itself has passed away, these are only sentimental revivals. The horseless carriages are upon us, and “going strong,” alike in speed and scent. The odour of the imperfectly-combusted petrol desecrates the airs of the country-side. Already the length and breadth of the land have been explored by them, on roads good, bad and indifferent, hilly or flat; and the characteristic rattle of their machinery and the hoarse trumpeting of their cyclorns are becoming familiar even to the rustics of Devon and Somerset. Let it not be supposed, however, that skill in driving is not so necessary now as in the days of the spanking teams of coach-horses. The careful coachman of old saved his horses over the road for the long climbs and rugged places; he “sprung” them perhaps on the level, and gave them a “towelling” as a persuader to greater efforts through snow-drifts, winds or floods; and the driver of a motor-car does many of these things to his machinery, not indeed with the aid of a whip, but through the agency of levers, taps and brakes. You can overdrive and exhaust a motor just as easily as you can a horse, while it wants feeding just as well. “A just man is merciful to his beast,” and a cautious man is careful of his car, not only because if he was not he would perhaps be left with half a ton of inert machinery upon the road, but because he is just as fond of his automobile as many another of his steeds of flesh and blood.