Scouring England on a bicycle to complete the collection of old inns for this book, I came, on the way from Gloucester to Bath, upon such a superseded road, studded with houses that had once been coaching hostelries and posting-houses and are now farmsteads; and others that, although they still carry on their licensed trade, do so in strangely altered and meagre fashion, in dim corners of half-deserted and all-too-roomy buildings. It is thirty-four miles of mostly difficult and lonely road between those two cities: a road of incredible hills and, when you have come past Stroud and Nailsworth, of almost equally incredible solitudes. You climb painfully up the north-westerly abutments of the Cotswolds, to the roof of the world at a place well named Edge, and there in a bird’s-eye view you see Painswick down below, and thenceforward go swashing away steeply, some three miles, down into the crowded cloth-weaving town of Stroud, where most things are prosperous and commonplace, and only the “Royal George Hotel” attracts attention, less for its own sake than by reason of the lion and unicorn over its portico: the lion very golden and very fierce, apparently in the act of coming down to make a meal of some temerarious guest; the unicorn more than usually milk-white and mild-mannered. [Illustration: A DESERTED INN: THE “SWAN,” AT FERRYBRIDGE.] Beyond Nailsworth begin the hills again, and the loneliness intensifies after passing the admirably-named Tiltups End. “How well the name figures the gradient!” thinks the cyclist who comes this way and pauses, after walking two miles up hill, to regain his breath. He has here come to the very ideal of what we learned at school to be an “elevated plateau, or table-land”; and a plaguy ill-favoured, inhospitable place it is, too, yet not without a certain grim, hard-featured interest in its starveling acres, its stone-walled, hedgeless fields, and distant spinneys. It is interesting, if only serving to show that to our grandfathers, who perforce fared this way before railways, their faring was not all jam. Nor is it so to the modern tourist who--_experto crede_--faces a buffeting head-wind in an inclement April, and encounters along these weary miles a succession of snow-blizzards and hail-showers: all in the pursuit of knowledge at first-hand. The way avoids all towns and villages, and all wayfarers who can shift to do so avoid this way; and you who must trace it have but occasional cottages, often empty and ruinous, or a lonely prehistoric sepulchral barrow or so for company--and they are not hilarious companions. Your only society is that rarely failing friend and comforter--your map, and here even the map is lacking in solace, for when it ceases to trace a merely empty road, it does so chiefly to chronicle such depressing names as “Starveall,” an uncomplimentary sidelight on the poor land where neither farmers can live nor beasts graze; or others as