In the country motor-cars have become indispensable, more especially to landed proprietors, with houses always full of visitors who, with their luggage, have to be conveyed to and from the station. They are much used for race-meetings and for conveying shooting parties to the covert side, stubble, or moor, in comfort, golfers to the links, and fishermen to the riverbank; picnics would be failures without them; and delightful excursions to all kinds of outlying places are arranged by the host, proud of “motoring” his guests, who thus are made acquainted with bits of beautiful scenery they would otherwise have remained ignorant of; as in the case of the King’s and Queen’s visit to Chatsworth last January, when a feature of the programme was a series of motor-car tours in North and West Derbyshire. In fact, the motor is a most important factor in English country life, and the art of managing it is gradually superseding that of riding, driving, and four-in-hand coaching. Eheu! Horseless vehicles are not actual novelties. They have merely been in abeyance while the perfecting of our iron roads has proceeded. The earliest practical specimen emanated from an inventor named Guyniot a hundred and thirty years ago, but nothing commercially serious came of it, and the idea slept. In 1786 William Symington produced his steam-engine, to run upon an ordinary road. It had the condenser and the ratchet-motion used in his steamboat, an invention of which he was the originator. The boiler and funnel were in the front, a coach on C-springs between them, and the steering gear, with a kind of bicycle handle-bar, at the rear. The machine, it was said, worked well. Then, in 1821, a steam-coach by Griffiths attracted much attention, being the first self-propelled vehicle to ply for passengers on British roads. It had a boiler with water-tubes as now used in the Serpollet and Belleville systems for motor-cars. In appearance it somewhat resembled the Symington, but carried a double coach mounted on railway springs. Walter Hancock’s three-wheeled steam-coach of 1828 looked like a tricycle with a big funnel, and was propelled by a pair of oscillating cylinders working the double-cranked axle of the steering-wheel. In 1859 the Marquis of Stafford had a steam-coach built that weighed less than a ton. With its chain-action it anticipated the modern bicycle: in front it had a kind of bath-chair seat facing the steering gear. In this vehicle Lord Stafford and party of three made trips at from nine to twelve miles an hour over heavy roads without any difficulty, it being easy to guide and remarkably steady. In these steam coaches the funnels appear to have been placed in the rear. All these ideas, though from one point of view crude, undoubtedly represented “...such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise.”