_In the old days of the road, the traveller saw his destination afar off, and--town or city or village--it disclosed itself by degrees to his appreciative or critical eyes. He saw it, seated sheltered in its vale, or, perched on its hilltop, the sport of the elements; and so came, with a continuous panorama of country in his mind's eye, to his inn. By rail the present-day traveller has many comforts denied to his grandfather, but there is no blinking the fact that he is conveyed very much in the manner of a parcel or a bale of goods, and is delivered at his journeys end oppressed with a sense of detachment never felt by one who travelled the road in days of old, or even by the cyclist in the present age. The railway traveller is set down out of the void in a strange place, many leagues from his base; the country between a blank and the place to which he has come an unknown quantity. In so travelling he has missed much._ _The old roads and their romance are the heritage of the modern tourist, by whatever method he likes to explore them. Countless generations of men have built up the highways, the cities, towns, villages and hamlets along their course, and have lived and loved, have laboured, fought and died through the centuries. Will you not halt awhile and listen to their story--fierce, pitiful, lovable, hateful, tender or terrible, just as you may hap upon it; flashing forth as changefully out of the past as do the rays from the facets of a diamond? A battle was fought here, an historic murder wrought there. This way came such an one to seek his fortune and find it; that way went another, to lose life and fortune both. In yon house was born the Man of his Age, for whom that age was ripe; on yonder hillock an olden malefactor, whom modern times would call a reformer, expiated the crime of being born too early--there is no cynic more consistent in his cynicism than Time._ _All these have lived and wrought and thought to this one unpremeditated end--that the tourist travels smoothly and safely along roads once rough and dangerous beyond belief, and that as he goes every place has a story to tell, for him to hear if he will. If he have no ears for such, so much the worse for him, and by so much the poorer his faring._ CHARLES G. HARPER. PETERSHAM, SURREY, _October 1902_. [Illustration: LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS] SEPARATE PLATES PAGE THE "CAMBRIDGE TELEGRAPH" STARTING FROM THE WHITE HORSE, FETTER LANE _Frontispiece_ _From a Print after J. Pollard._ THE "STAR OF CAMBRIDGE" STARTING FROM THE BELLE SAUVAGE YARD, LUDGATE HILL, 1816 17 _From a Print after T. Young._ "KNEE-DEEP": THE "LYNN AND WELLS MAIL" IN A SNOWSTORM 23 _From a Print after C. Cooper Henderson._