If we could recapture those times we should find them spacious days, of much fresh air, illimitable horizons, a great deal of solid, unostentatious comfort for the stay-at-homes, and also of much discomfort for the traveller; but although no sensible person, fully informed of the conditions of life in the long ago, would wish he had been born into those times, yet among their disadvantages and the discomforts incidental to travel scarce more than two generations ago, there were to be found, as a matter of course, not a few things which would be looked upon with rapture by the modern sentimentalist. That was the era when the Suburb was unknown anywhere else than around London, and even London’s suburbs were sparse, scattered, sporadic, and separated by great distances from one another. Taking coach from the City, where the merchants and the shopkeepers commonly lived over their business premises, you came presently, north, south, east, or west, through suburban Stamford Hill, Sydenham, Clapton, or Kensington, to rural Edmonton, Croydon, Romford, or Chiswick, and so presently to the Unknown. _That_ was, of itself, a charm in the old order of things--a charm lost long since in these crowded times, when constant and intimate travel have made us familiar with distant towns, and by consequence incurious and incapable of surprises. Everything is known, if not at the first hand of personal observation, at least by proxy of our reading in guide-book history, or by the debilitating photograph, which leaves nothing to the imagination, and renders us travelled in the uttermost nooks and corners of the land, even though we be bedridden, or thoroughgoing _habitués_ of the armchair and the fireside. The picture-postcard--the lowest common denominator of the photograph--has come to give the last touch of satiety, the final revulsion of repletion. The Land’s End has long since been exploited, John o’ Groat’s is merely at the end of a cycle ride, the “bottomless” caverns of the Peak have been plumbed, every unscalable mountain climbed. “_Connu!_” we exclaim when we are told any fact. No surprises are left. We may never before have journeyed to Edinburgh, but photographs have rendered us so long familiar with its castle and rock that we cannot recollect a time when we were not familiar with the physical geography of the “modern Athens,” and we seem to have been born with a knowledge of the geographical peculiarities of every other place. We are, therefore, naturally bored and unresponsive in situations where our grandfathers were surprised and delighted; but although possessed thereby with a profound dissatisfaction with ourselves, we cannot hope to win back to the unsophisticated joys of old time.