bloodshot eyes the next morning, and broken perforce the next evening; but night travelling by motor-car in winter is not to be recommended unless the moon is strong. It is a process to be resolved upon when circumstances suit, not to be planned in advance. From Acle to Norwich was ten miles more or less of up-and-down travelling, the hills not serious enough to try a good motor high, and it was an unfeigned relief to reach the shelter and food of the Royal Hotel. Here, practically, ends the account of the second day of this excursion, for the Royal Hotel is comfortable, not expensive as English hotels go, and new; but mere comfort is fortunately commonplace, its novelty is rather more of an outrage than usual in this case, and the novelty of the hotel's name is an offence not to be pardoned. Here, where the modern "Royal" stands, in the very centre of the city, stood the famous "Angel" from the fifteenth century at least to the middle of the nineteenth. Local antiquaries, many and eager, rejoice in tracing the history of this celebrated hostelry, finding frequent allusions to it in the records of the Master of the Revels, for here mountebanks performed, and theatrical performances were given, and strange monsters were shown. It had the glory of paying £115 tax for thirty windows in the eighteenth century--this makes one understand the blocked windows in old houses more sympathetically than a bare mention of window tax does--and it was the great Whig House in the days when Norfolk elections were, as Mr. Walter Rye tells us, half of the history of Norfolk, the other half being concerned with trade. It is true that Mr. Walter Rye, speaking of the election of 1675, says that Sir Nevill Cattyn's party "used the 'Royal,' (then the 'King's Head,') and the other side, using a stratagem--singularly enough repeated at the same house last election, two or three years ago--ordered a great dinner there on the pretence that they might 'friendly meet and dine' with the other party, and ultimately secured the whole house as their election quarters; Cattyn, who was brought into town by four thousand horsemen, having to put up with the 'White Swan' 'at the back side of the butchers' shambles'" (_A History of Norfolk_, by Walter Rye. Elliot Stock, 1885). I prefer to pin my faith to _Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries_, not only because its elaborate article on the topic is evidently based on careful research, but also because its statements are not contradicted in subsequent issues, and these bear eloquent testimony to the fact that the local antiquaries of East Anglia have at least one trait in common with the antiquaries of the wider world--they contradict with freedom and dispute with endless pertinacity. Here there is no contradiction (and Mr. Rye's accuracy is by no means equal to his industry or to his love of antiquity), so it may be taken as reasonably certain that the "Royal" is on the site of the "Angel," and that