When Mrs. Calderwood, of Polton and Coltness, made a journey from Scotland into England in 1756, she wrote a diary, a very much more entertaining and instructive affair than the Reverend Mr. Brome’s book--which, indeed, could have been compiled from other works without the necessity of travelling, and, but for a few fleeting glimpses of original observation, actually gives that impression. Mrs. Calderwood tells us that at Durham she went to see the Cathedral, where the woman who conducted her round the building did not understand her Scottish ways (nor indeed did Mrs. Calderwood comprehend everything English). “I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers.” Mrs. Calderwood, quite obviously, had never heard of St. Cuthbert and his antipathy to women, so respected at Durham that womankind were not admitted within certain boundaries in his Cathedral church; nor was she familiar with hassocks, for she narrates how the woman “stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.” The modern tourist along our roads finds a deadly sameness overspreading all parts of the country. The same cheap little suburban houses of stereotyped fashion, built to let at from £25 to £30 a year, that sprawl in mile upon mile on the outer ring of London, are to be found--nay, are insistently to the foreground--wherever he goes. They form the approach to, the outpost of, every town, large or small, he enters, and are built in the same way, and of the same materials, whether he travels farther north, south, east, or west. It was not so, need it be said, in the old times. Then the coach passenger with an eye for the beautiful and the unusual had that sense abundantly gratified along almost every mile of his course, for when men did not build on contract, and when the contractor, had he existed, would not have been able to work outside his own district, there was individuality in building design. We all know the truth of the adage that “variety is charming,” and of variety the travellers had their fill. And not only was there variety in design, but an endless change of materials gratified the eyes of those who cared for these things. London, with its dingy brick, was succeeded, as one penetrated westwards, by the weather-boarded cottages of Brentford and Hounslow, by the timber framing and brick nogging of the next districts, by the chalk and flint of Hampshire and Wilts; and at last, when one had come to the stone country, by the yellow ferruginous sandstone of Ham Hill, that characterises the houses and cottages between Shaftesbury, Crewkerne and Chard. Coming into Devon, the yellow stone was replaced by the