Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic. Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five years since the Great Western Railway was opened through to Exeter, and during that more than half a century these long reaches of the road have been deserted. Do belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit nights along this tree-shaded road, ever conjure up a picture of the last mail down; the farewells at the inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning out of their windows, to see the visible passing away of an epoch; the flashing of the lamps past the hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away? If they do not, why then they must be sadly lacking in imagination, or ill-read in the Story of the Roads. Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four and a half miles from Honiton, and all ways seem to lead to Exeter, there stands on the grassy plot at the fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop, Dr. Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyrdom, together with two other workers in the missionfield, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the eldest son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by, hence the placing of this brick and stone column here, surmounted by a cross, and plentifully inscribed with texts. The story of his and his friends’ death is set forth as having been ‘in vengeance for wrongs suffered at the hands of Europeans by savage men whom he loved and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.’ This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post, for directions are carved on its four sides; and very necessary too, for where two roads go to Exeter, the one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than the other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be depended upon for clear and concise information. Cobbett in his day found that exasperating direction of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ‘keep straight on,’ just as great a delusion as the tourist now discovers it to be. The formula, according to him, was a little different in his time, being ‘keep _right_ on.’ ‘Aye,’ says he, ‘but in ten minutes, perhaps, you come to a [Y] or a [T], or to a [X]. A fellow once told me, in my way from Chertsey to Guildford, “keep _right on_, you can’t miss your way.” I was in the perpendicular part of the [T], and the top part was only a few yards from me. “_Right on_,” said I, “what, over _that bank_ into the wheat?”--“No, no,” said he, “I mean _that road_, to be sure,” pointing to the road that went off to the _left_.’