Liddell, who had an escort of sixteen mounted servants, started an hour later than Metcalf. It had been arranged that they should meet that night at Welwyn, but, a little beyond Barnet, on Hadley Green, where the roads divide, Metcalf took the left hand, or Holyhead, road by mistake and went a long distance before he discovered his mistake. Still he arrived at Welwyn first. The next day he was balked at Biggleswade by the river, which was in flood, and with no bridge to cross by. Fortunately, after wandering some distance along the banks, he met a stranger who led the way across a plank bridge. When they had crossed, Metcalf offered him some pence for a glass of beer, which his guide declined, saying he was welcome. Metcalf, however, pressed it upon him. “Pray, can you see very well?” asked the stranger. “Not very well,” replied Blind Jack. “God forbid I should tithe you,” said his guide. “I am the rector of this parish; so God bless you, and I wish you a good journey.” In the end, Metcalf reached Harrogate two days before the colonel. Metcalf made many roads around Knaresborough and in different parts of Yorkshire, but none actually on the Great North Road. He died, aged ninety-three, in 1810, five years before Macadam and Telford began their work upon the roads. Like them, he rather preferred boggy ground for road-making, and forestalled both them and Stephenson in adopting fagots as foundations over mires. At that time the ignorant surveyors of roads repaired them with dirt scraped from ditches and water-courses, in which they embedded the first cartloads of stones which came to hand; stone of all kinds and all sizes. This done, their “repairs” were completed, with the result that the roads were frequently as bad as ever and constantly in the most rugged condition. Roads—it may be news to the uninstructed—cannot be made with dirt. In fact, a good road through anything but rock is generally excavated, and the native earth being removed, its place is taken by coarse-broken granite or rock; this in its turn receiving a layer of “macadam,” or smaller broken granite or whinstone, which is finally bound together by a sprinkling of red gravel, of the kind known by builders as “hoggin,” whose binding qualities are caused by a slight natural admixture of clay. In his insistence upon broken stones, Macadam proved a power of observation not possessed by the generality of road-makers, whose method was the haphazard one of strewing any kind upon the road and trusting in the traffic to pack them. With rounded pebbles or gravel stones thus chafing against one another, they never packed into a solid mass, but remained for all time as unstable as a shingly beach. Generations of road-making had not taught wisdom, but Macadam perceived the readiness of the angularities in broken stones to unite and form a homogeneous mass, and in introducing his system proved himself unwittingly a man of science, for science has in these later days