where for some years longer he continued to do a little business in his old line, buying and selling hay and standing wood, and superintending the operations of his little farm, During the later years of his career he occupied himself in dictating to an amanuensis an account of the incidents in his remarkable life, and finally, in the year 1810, this strong-hearted and resolute man --his life's work over--laid down his staff and peacefully departed in the ninety-third year of his age; leaving behind him four children, twenty grand-children, and ninety great grand-children. [Image] Metcalf's house at Spofforth. The roads constructed by Metcalf and others had the effect of greatly improving the communications of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and opening up those counties to the trade then flowing into them from all directions. But the administration of the highways and turnpikes being entirely local, their good or bad management depending upon the public spirit and enterprise of the gentlemen of the locality, it frequently happened that while the roads of one county were exceedingly good, those of the adjoining county were altogether execrable. Even in the immediate vicinity of the metropolis the Surrey roads remained comparatively unimproved. Those through the interior of Kent were wretched. When Mr. Rennie, the engineer, was engaged in surveying the Weald with a view to the cutting of a canal through it in 1802, he found the country almost destitute of practicable roads, though so near to the metropolis on the one hand and to the sea-coast on the other. The interior of the county was then comparatively untraversed, except by bands of smugglers, who kept the inhabitants in a state of constant terror. In an agricultural report on the county of Northampton as late as the year 1813, it was stated that the only way of getting along some of the main lines of road in rainy weather, was by swimming! In the neighbourhood of the city of Lincoln the communications were little better, and there still stands upon what is called Lincoln Heath--though a heath no longer--a curious memorial of the past in the shape of Dunstan Pillar, a column seventy feet high, erected about the middle of last century in the midst of the then dreary, barren waste, for the purpose of serving as a mark to wayfarers by day and a beacon to them by night.*[2] [Image] Land Lighthouse on Lincoln Heath.