At the crossing of the little Kennett we finally leave Cambridgeshire and come into Suffolk. On the Suffolk side stands the “Red Lodge” inn, a solitary old house on the heaths that again resume, and continue until the chalk is changed for a gravelly soil at the summit of the rise called Chalk Hill. It is a lonelier road now than ever it had been in all the centuries between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the railway era. Railways at one blow took not only the passenger traffic, but the carriage of goods and minerals; and the cattle and sheep once driven in hundreds of thousands along the highways and byways began to be despatched in cattle-trucks. We cannot fully realise this olden state of the roads, but we can make an effort towards it: can project ourselves into the seventeenth century, and see and hear the droves of turkeys, five hundred in each, come gobbling and bubbling, in the manner peculiar to turkeys, all the way from the farmyards to the London markets. Can also watch in imagination the waddling march of the thousands of geese bred on these commons, and sent hissing and snapping down this long course of a hundred miles to celebrate the September feast of St. Michael on many a metropolitan dinner-table. Alas, poor Michaelmas geese! Alas, too, for the Christmas geese! but _they_ went more gloriously to martyrdom, being carried all the way instead of driven. The reason for this was that the muddy roads of late autumn and early winter were too soft and sticky for their feet, and so they rode to town in the “goose-cart,” a four-storeyed conveyance as Defoe tells us, “with two horses abreast, like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that thus ride.” A neglected item of information, from a local newspaper of the time, helps the imagination in later, but still forgotten, things. Thus we read of a village on the Ipswich route from London to Norwich: “In the last droving season, 1845, the landlord of the ‘Bird in Hand,’ Tasburgh, housed 9,300 beasts. He purchased for their consumption and for horses, etc., fifty tons of hay; but in the following year, owing to the opening of the Norfolk Railway, only twelve beasts were taken in, and only 8½ cwt. of hay was wanted.”