Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the better he becomes acquainted with it. Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists, brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern; and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly Conisford Street. The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name, standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."