uiet village nestling in the Dorset hills. One of the quaintest of
these, not even mentioned in Baedeker, is Cerne Abbas, a straggling
village through which the road twisted along--a little old-world
community, seemingly severed from modern conditions by centuries. It
rather lacked the cozy picturesqueness of many English villages. It
seemed to us that it wanted much of the bloom and shrubbery. Everywhere
were the gray stone houses with thatched roofs, sagging walls and odd
little windows with square or diamond-shaped panes set in iron
casements. Nowhere was there a structure that had the slightest taint of
newness. The place is quite unique. I do not recall another village that
impressed us in just the same way. Our car seemed strangely out of place
as it cautiously followed the crooked main street of the town, and the
attention bestowed on it by the smaller natives indicated that a motor
was not a common sight in Cerne Abbas. Indeed, we should have missed it
ourselves had we not wandered from the main road into a narrow lane that
led to the village. While we much enjoyed our day in the Dorset byways,
our progress had necessarily been slow.

In Yeovil, we found an old English town apparently without any important
history, but a prosperous center for a rich farming country. The place
is neat and clean and has a beautifully kept public park--a feature of
which the average English town appears more appreciative than the small
American city.

From Yeovil to Torquay, through Exeter, with a stop at the latter place,
was an unusually good day's run. The road was more hilly than any we had
passed over heretofore, not a few of the grades being styled
"dangerous," and we had been warned by an English friend that we should
find difficult roads and steep hills in Devon and Cornwall. However, to
one who had driven over some of our worst American roads, even the "bad"
roads of England looked good, and the "dangerous" hills, with their
smooth surface and generally uniform grade, were easy for our
moderate-powered motor.

Exeter enjoys the distinction of having continuously been the site of a
town or city for a longer period than is recorded of any other place in
England. During the Roman occupation it was known as a city, and it is
believed that the streets, which are more regular than usual and which
generally cross each other at right angles, were first laid out by the
Romans. It is an important town of about fifty thousand inhab