Here again the traveller by waggon went more cheaply than the horseman. What with the absence of sign-posts, the scarcity of persons to ask, the frequent indistinguishableness of the road from its margin and its surroundings, a stranger was practically forced to be guided. In 1648 this brought the cost of a journey from London to Dover to £1 15s. 10d.[133] [say, £8]. In a town this applied to every one who had no friends there. Every single feature on which one depends nowadays was absent, or, if present, present only in embryo,—visible street-names, printed suggestions other than historical, detailed plans, the wide, straight streets which allow the mystified to discover his whereabouts without climbing a church-tower. In short, what was worth seeing was mostly heard of only by word of mouth, and to find it one needed to be led there. Expenditure on guides reached its highest point when the Alps were snowbound; after a heavy fall he who wished to pass must wait till others had made fresh tracks or pay anything up to fifty crowns [£75] to have it done for him. To pass Mont Cenis cost in the ordinary way the equivalent of about £4 10s.; that is, about half what the 'vetturino' would want to take each one of several from Lyons to Turin—six crowns, which latter sum is about ten times as much as the second-class fare to-day. But then the journey takes twelve hours now and took seven days then, with food all the while at travellers' prices. The length of journeys stands out as the chief factor in the comparative costliness. Take a typical case, that of the five middle-class men[134] who left Venice on February 20, 1655, who wasted no time on the way, reached England on March 29, and spent one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Reckoning this as equalling £625, this works out as the equivalent of £125 each for thirty-seven days, or £3 7s. 7d. a day. If a man left Venice now on February 20, he might break the journey at Bâle, to do things comfortably, and arrive in London at 5.38 A. M. on February 22. Second-class fare would be £5 10s. 7d.; add £2 for meals and incidentals, £7 10s. 7d. in all, an average of £3 3s. a day. The other thirty-four and a half days of the thirty-seven his food would be paid for at home rates, say 2s. 6d. a day, £4 6s. 3d., which, added to the £7 10s. 7d., gives £11 16s. 10d. Now the daily average of about 7s. higher in the cost of travel apart from food, as above represented,—mainly accounted for by the relative cost of horses and guides as against railway fares,—only comes to £13 in thirty-seven days. On this basis the journey from Venice to London two hundred and fifty years ago cost between nine and ten times as much as it would to-day, solely on account of the difference in speed. That the expenditure of these five middle-class men was very reasonable is easily verifiable, as, for example, by the accounts of Muscorno,[135] another Venetian secretary, whose bill for coming to England, for