Let us halt awhile, to admire the courage of those coaching and waggoning pioneers who, in the days before "the sea-side" had been invented, and few people travelled, dared the awful roads for what must then have been a precarious business. Sussex roads in especial had a most unenviable name for miriness, and wheeled traffic was so difficult that for many years after this period the farmers and others continued to take their womenkind about in the pillion fashion here caricatured by Henry Bunbury. [Sidenote: SUSSEX ROADS] Horace Walpole, indeed, travelling in Sussex in 1749, visiting Arundel and Cowdray, acquired a too intimate acquaintance with their phenomenal depth of mud and ruts, inasmuch as he--finicking little gentleman--was compelled to alight precipitately from his overturned chaise, and to foot it like any common fellow. One quite pities his daintiness in the narration of his sorrows, picturesquely set forth by that accomplished letter-writer arrived home to the safe seclusion of Strawberry Hill. He writes to George Montagu, and dates August 26th, 1749: "Mr. Chute and I returned from our expedition miraculously well, considering all our distresses. If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole county has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George the Second was the first monarch of the East Angles. Coaches grow there no more than balm and spices: we were forced to drop our post-chaise, that resembled nothing so much as harlequin's calash, which was occasionally a chaise or a baker's cart. We journeyed over alpine mountains" (Walpole, you will observe, was, equally with the evening journalist of these happy times, not unaccustomed to exaggerate) "drenched in clouds, and thought of harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the morning clouds, and was so glad to hear the _aqua vitæ_ man crying a dram.... I have set up my staff, and finished my pilgrimages for this year. Sussex is a great damper of curiosity." Thus he prattles on, delightfully describing the peculiarities of the several places he visited with this Mr. Chute, "whom," says he, "I have created _Strawberry King-at-Arms_." One wonders what that mute, inglorious Chute thought of it all; if he was as disgusted with Sussex sloughs and moist unpleasant "mountains" as his garrulous companion. Chute suffered in silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper did not induce in _him_ a fury of composition; and so we shall never know what he endured.