long ago sliced off the most aspiring hilltops, and, carrying the roads through cuttings, used the material thus cut away for the purpose of filling up the gullies and deep depressions. Where the early coaches toiled, often axle-deep, through the watersplashes formed by the little rills and streams that ran athwart the way, later generations have built bridges, or have done things infinitely worse; so that a watersplash has become a rare and curious object, noteworthy in a day’s journey. Only recently, on the Dover Road, near Faversham, has such a watersplash--one of the most picturesque in the country--been abolished. Ospringe was a little Kentish Venice, with a clear-running shallow stream occupying the whole of the roadway, with raised footpaths for pedestrians at either side, and ancient gabled cottages looking down upon the pretty scene. Alas! the sparkling stream now goes under the road, in a pipe. In the old days, no traveller going north along the Great North Road left Alconbury without first seeing that the priming of his pistols was in order, while the passengers by mail or stage secretly put their watches and jewellery between their skin and their underclothing, or deposited their purses in their boots, before the coach topped Alconbury Hill. For at “Aukenbury,” as Ogilby in his old road-maps styles it, you were on the threshold of a robbing-place only less famous than Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, or those other notorious dark or daylight lurks (for day or night mattered little in those times), Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common. The name of this ill-reputed place was “Stonegate Hole.” It is marked distinctly on the maps of Ogilby and his successors, between the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth milestones from London, by the Old North Road, measured from Shoreditch, and passing through Ware, Royston, and Caxton. Passing Papworth Everard, you came in those days, on the left hand, just before reaching the fifty-sixth milestone, to “Beggar’s Bush,” where you probably saw the tramps, vagrants and footpads of that age skulking, on the chance of robbing some traveller unable to take care of himself. Here, in sight of these wretches, you ostentatiously toyed with your pistol holsters, or loosened your sword in its scabbard, and so passed on scathless. On leaving Alconbury, however, the horseman generally preferred company, because the highwaymen of Stonegate Hole were well armed, and, by consequence, courageous.