Upon their way to Canterbury, the travellers, and our foreigner in particular, had for some time perceived that they were no longer in France, and when at length they reached that bourne of pilgrims they were still further impressed with that fact by observing a fat man, who was just arisen from bed, standing at a bay window during the whole time the flying machines changed their Pegasuses; and, as they were unexpected the delay was considerable. But all this while the fat man stood there in his night-shirt, with a velvet cap on his head, contemplating them with folded arms and knitted brow, and with an expression which (in France) was to be seen only on the faces of them that had just buried their dearest friends. Also, the "young persons" of both sexes stood and stared--not to mince matters--like stuck pigs. The country which they travelled through from Dover to London was (so our traveller thought) in general a bad mixture of sand and chalk. They skirted some lovely woods as well furnished as the best-stocked forests of France--alas! where are those woods now?--and presently passed over commons covered with heath and stray broom, very high and flourishing all the year round. Those wild shrubs were left to the use of the poor of the several different parishes, but their vigour and thickness gave reason to conjecture that there were but few poor people in those parishes. The best lands were then, as now, laid out in hop-gardens. The wayside inns appealed strongly to our traveller. They were given, whether in town or country, to the making of large accounts, but then see how rich was the English lord who, as a class, frequented them. Anyway, they were possessed of a cleanliness far beyond that to be found in the majority of the best private houses in France. There was only one inn on the road from Paris to Boulogne to be mentioned in the same breath with the English houses, and that was one at Montreuil, frequented by English travellers. Between Canterbury and Rochester the coaches encountered an obstacle which savours rather of Don Quixote's adventures than of Sunday travelling in this unromantic country. This was nothing less than a windmill which the country-folk, taking advantage of that usually coachless day, were moving entire. Less fiery than the Don, the travellers outflanked the gigantic obstacle by dragging the coaches into the field beside the road. And of that road, M. Grosley has to say that it was excellent; covered with powdered flints, and well kept, in spite of the exemption from forced labour which the countrymen enjoyed; and here he quotes what Aurelius Victor has to say of the Emperor Vespasian's vast roadworks in Britain.