with easy joy as of a man reading a great adventure when the heroes of it have long been dead, for we ourselves were so much above all that expanse which, powerless and quiet, might almost seem to belong to the past or to a tale. We and the storm were one and we were triumphant; and in mid triumph we came down to the lighted streets. As the first roads were made by men following herds, either as hunters or as herdsmen, so ox and sheep have long helped to keep them up. The great road of pilgrimage from Damascus to Mecca is not a made road, but composed of the parallel strands of old hollow camel paths. These, says Mr. Charles M. Doughty in _Arabia Deserta_, “one of the ancient Arabian poets has compared to the bars of the rayed Arabic mantle.” To our own day in England drovers took the cattle lazily along the old roads of the watersheds and ridges. “Ox Drove” is the name in several places of an old green road. Travellers in Wiltshire have noticed on the one-inch Ordnance Survey Map a “British Trackway” running W.S.W. out of the road from the Deverills to Maiden Bradley. A large tumulus stands in the first field, as if for a sign at the beginning of the track. Locally this is known as the “Ox Road,” and is said to have been used by droves coming from Mid and East Somerset. It is a continuation of the hard road which it leaves at the tumulus, and following it and its continuations you may travel through Kilmington, and between the Jack’s Castle tumulus and King Alfred’s tower, down Kingsettle Hill, and on close to Cadbury Castle, to Ilchester, and, joining the Foss Way, reach Devon and Cornwall. Only one mile of its course is marked in Old English letters “British Trackway,” and this is apparently not even a path, but a protracted unevenness of the ground, sometimes almost amounting to a ridge or terrace in the grass, for the most part following the hedges, and in one place entering a short, nettly lane. The road, in spite of its romantic Old English lettering, is at this point a very humble specimen of an ancient road and ox drove; for it goes through meadows which are low compared with the fine waves of Down--White Sheet Downs and the Maiden Bradley Hills--on either side of it. A far better one is the ox drove which this joins at Kilmington. It is said to have been used as a road from London to Exeter. Farmers will tell you that the Ox Drove “never touched water,” which they will qualify by saying you could go from Monkton Deverill to Marlborough without touching water or crossing it, and if that also is impossible, at any rate they have the tradition of the road’s character in their heads, seldom as they may use it. Along it, says Mr. J. U. Powell,[2] came “fat cattle from the Somerset pastures to London,” and once he thinks it was a road leading to the lead of Somerset and tin of Cornwall. [2] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, XXXIV.