night,
who now overjoyed to see an old acquaintance, were so kind and loving
that what with shaking hands, riding abreast, in this bad way, and
other expressions of their civilities, they put me in as much trouble
with their favour as before they had put me to inconvenience by their
rudeness: yet, by this means, I procured them to ride so easily as I
led my horse down the next steep hill, on the side of which lay a
vast number of huge stones, one intire stone of them being as big as
an ordinary house: some of the smaller they cut into mill-stones.
Passing the river--Derwent--which then ran with the strongest current
that ever I beheld any, we climbed over another hill, a mile up and a
mile down, and got to Bakewell a little after it was dark."

We have a few data of the speed possible in travelling on extraordinary
occasions. We select one of each kind--that of the mounted express and
that of the Great Lady who kept her carriage, as the extremes, so far as
regards the instruments of conveyance. For a horseman can go where a
wheel-carriage cannot find a track: and on the other hand, the traveller
on foot can generally choose a more direct line of movement, than is
practicable for the four-footed servant of man, encumbered with his rider
and his furniture.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the herald of the king of
Scotland, who, it may be supposed, carried with him a royal mandate to be
first served by the livery stables, was allowed forty days to reach the
Border from London, although it appears that Robert Bruce took only seven
to put the Border between himself and Gloucester. But neither Bruce nor
the mother of Richard II., who came in one day from Canterbury to London,
can be taken as precedents of ordinary speed. For the one had received a
significant hint from some friendly courtier--a pair of spurs baked in a
pie--that King Edward was in high dudgeon with him, and could not dine
with either appetite or good digestion, until he had seen Bruce's head:
and of the Queen dowager is it not written that "she never durst tarry on
the waye," for Wat Tyler was behind her, vowing vengeance upon all
principalities and powers? Howbeit her majesty was so thoroughly jolted
and unsettled by the "slapping pace" at which she travelled, that she had
a bilious attack forthwith, and was "sore syke, and like to die."

To the difficulty of transit on roads was owing the estab