“_Onward and onward the highway runs to the distant city, impatiently bearing Tidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring._” THE GOLDEN LEGEND. _Those lines, instinct with the dramatic possibilities of the road in far-off days, call to mind the old engravings and wood-cuts of the Durer school, in whose back-grounds, on the Hill Terrible, sits the City Beautiful, reached along a delectable road that wanders, now across open heaths and then disappears in the welcome shade of hoary woods; reappearing to reach its goal beside mountain streams and torrents, whose boulderous course it spans by high-arched bridges. Down such roads as these, in woodcuts such as those, go horsed and armed knights, very plumy and steely, ladies fair on their palfreys, with high-horned head-dresses; pages, men-at-arms, peasants, and all the mediæval traffic of the highways; while the verminous hermit in his cell by the bridge comes to his door as the wayfarers go by, scratching himself with one hand, and in the other holding a scallop-shell for the alms he, in a pitiful voice and in the name of God and all the saints, implores._ _Those lines, in that modern versification of the terrible old legend by Jacobus de Voragine, bring all these things vividly before the imagination. You may almost scent the hawthorn blossom on the wayside hedges, can all but feel the soft breath of the wind, or the heat o’ the sun, and can even smell the hermit, rich in pietistic dirt. Joy and disaster, love and hate, doing and daring, all had their place on the highway in those times: Romance and the Road were terms convertible._ _Now all those things are as tales that are told; but for centuries the Road retained that old distinction: the mediæval company had passed away: the knights and the ladies to their altar-tombs in the old country churches, the rest none knows whither; but after then came later generations, all travelling, living, hating, and loving along the highways, and so they continued to do, through the coaching era and until railways for a_ _long series of years rendered the Road an obsolete institution._