Another theory--but one more ingenious than acceptable--has it that the phrase derives from Bath having always been a resort of beggars. What, then, more natural, we are asked, than for one accosted by a mendicant to recall this topographical notoriety, and bid the rogue "go to Bath"? For, according to Fuller, that worthy author of the "Worthies," there were "many in that place; some natives there, others repairing thither from all parts of the land; the poor for alms, the pained for ease. Whither should fowl flock in a hard frost but to the barn-door? Here, all the two seasons, being the general confluence of gentry. Indeed, laws are daily made to restrain beggars, and daily broken by the connivance of those who make them; it being impossible, when the hungry belly barks and bowels sound, to keep the tongue silent. And although oil of whip be the proper plaister for the cramp of laziness, yet some pity is due to impotent persons. In a word, seeing there is the Lazar's-bath in this city, I doubt not but many a good Lazarus, the true object of charity, may beg therein." The road, then, to this City of Springs must have witnessed a motley throng. II The history of travelling, from the Creation to the present time, may be divided into four periods--those of no coaches, slow coaches, fast coaches, and railways. The "no-coach" period is a lengthy one, stretching, in fact, from the beginning of things, through the ages, down to the days of the Romans, and so on to the era when pack-horses conveyed travellers and goods along the uncertain tracks, which in the Middle Ages were all that remained of the highways built by that masterful race. The "slow-coach" era was preceded by an age when those few people who travelled at all went either on horseback, with their women-folk clinging on behind them, or else were wealthy enough to be able to afford the keep or hire of a "chariot," as the carriages of that time were named. That sinful old reprobate, Samuel Pepys, lived in the last days of the "no-coach" period, and saw the arrival of the slow coaches. He was one of those who used a chariot, and his "Diary" is full of accounts of how, on his innumerable journeys, he lost his way because of the badness of the roads, which then ran through vast stretches of unenclosed, uncultivated, and sparsely inhabited country, and were so fearfully bad that in many places the drivers did not dare to attempt such veritable "sloughs of despond," but drove around them over the hedgeless fields, thus making new tracks for themselves. In this way the origin of the winding character which many of our roads still retain is sufficiently accounted for. [Sidenote: _THE "FLYING MACHINE"_]