Let me, therefore, "cut the cackle and come"--not to "the 'osses" by any means--but to the country and to the motor-cars. On Monday, January the 23rd, 1906, my daughter and I proceeded first to Oxford, and then to Cambridge by rail. Both journeys were an object lesson in the inferiority of the railway train, as it is arranged in England, to the motor-car, for purposes of cross-country travel. Our starting point being Abingdon, distant six miles only from Oxford, we were compelled to change trains at Radley _en route_. A long wait at Oxford would have been irritating if it had not been providential; as it was it furnished me with a private copy of Mr. F. J. Haverfield's _Romano-British Norfolk_, extracted from the "Victoria County History," and the dreadfully tedious journey to Cambridge allowed me to master that most accomplished and useful work. Cambridge we reached--not for the first time by any means--well after dusk, and there we lay, as they used to say in old times, at the Bull Hotel on King's Parade in reasonable comfort, an undergraduate kinsman of Trinity College having cheered us by his company at dinner. Here let me pause for a moment to speak of an all-important matter. It has been written that we were comfortably entertained at the "Bull"; it might be added that the hotel seemed much cleaner and brighter than when I had last entered it, and that the charges were, for an English hotel, not unreasonable. Unfortunately, it must be said also that the charges at the "Bull" and throughout the United Kingdom are far in excess of those for which at least equal accommodation and at least equally palatable fare can be obtained on most parts of the Continent frequented by tourists, and that this fact is at once the most serious obstacle to tours by motor-cars at home, and the principal cause why Englishmen go touring abroad to the neglect of their own country, the prejudice of British hotel-keepers, and the profit of the foreigner. They do not, I think, desire to ignore the beauties of their own country; they are even anxious to study it in detail; but the hotel-keepers of the provinces, without quite killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, have a suicidal habit of making nesting accommodation so expensive that the bird, being a wise bird really, becomes perforce migratory as the swallow. More unwise in relation to the motorist even than in relation to the ordinary traveller--it will be observed that there is no special reference to the "Bull," and that we did not go there as motorists openly--hotel-keepers frequently behave as if they thought the owner of a motor-car must needs possess an endless supply of ready money, whereas the legitimate inference from his ownership of an expensive vehicle is that he has none to spare. Motor-cars of real value--and no sensible man will have them of any other kind--cannot be obtained on credit, and hotel-keepers might have learned from experience that a banking account is