This long neglect of the roads made country journeys exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Travellers' tales in England during six or seven centuries are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that, rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to these circumstances for an explanation. The southern counties bore a bad reputation for impassable roads until about seventy years ago, and Kentish miles were long linked with Essex stiles and Norfolk wiles as prime causes of beguilement; while the fertility of Kentish soil is joined with the muddy character of Kentish roads in two old county proverbs. Thus, "Bad for the rider, good for the abider," expressed truths obvious enough to those who came this way a hundred years ago; and "There is good land where there is foul way" would have said much for the excellence of Kent, where all the ways were foul. But if the traveller was not a landed gentleman, except in the sense that he was generally covered with mud from head to foot, the reflection that the county through which he waded deep in slush must be singularly fertile could scarce have afforded him much consolation for lost time and spoiled clothes. Here is a tale of an unfortunate horseman bogged on these miscalled "roads" which is quite eloquent of what old-time wayfaring was like. He comes to a suspicious-looking slough and hesitates. "Is there a good bottom here, my man?" he asks of a country joskin regarding him with a wide smile. "Oo-ah! yes, there's a good bottom to un," replies the countryman, and the traveller urges on his way until, within a yard or so, his horse sinks to the girth in liquid mud. "I thought you said there was a good bottom to this road," shouts the traveller. "Yes," rejoins the rustic, "soo there ees, but you a'n't coom to un yit, master." XX Strood is one long street of miscellaneous houses, with fields and meadows running up to the backyards; with engine-shops, mills, wheelwrights, and a variety of other noisy trades clanging and clattering in the rear, and an old church on the hillside to the left, appropriately dedicated to that patron of thieves and sailor-men, Saint Nicholas. But whether or no "Saint Nicholas' clerks" looked in here to pray the saint to send them "rick franklins and great oneyers" across that "high old robbing hill," I should not like to say; having though, the while, a shrewd suspicion that their piety was somewhat to seek, and that the shrine of the saint profited but little, if at all, from their ill-gotten gains upon the road. [Sidenote: "CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS"]