ty.

The road obstructions, slow-going traffic which will not get out of
one's way, carts left unattended and the like, make most of the real
and fancied dangers which are laid to the door of the very mobile
motor-car.

[Illustration: London and Paris traffic]

In Holland and Belgium dogs seem to be the chief road obstructions,
or at least dangers, not always willingly perhaps, but still
ever-present. In England it is mostly children.

In France not all the difficulties one meets with _en route_ are
willful obstructors of one's progress. In La Beauce the geese and
ducks are prudent, in the Nivernais the oxen are placid, and in
Provence the donkeys are philosophical; but in Brittany the horses
and mules and their drivers take fright immediately they suspect the
coming of an automobile, and in the Vendee the market-wagons, and
those laden with the product of the vine, career madly at the
extremities of exceedingly lusty examples of horse flesh to the
pending disaster of every one who does not get out of the road.

Sheep and hens are everywhere that they ought not to be, and there
seems no way of escaping them. One can but use all his ingenuity and
slip through somehow. Dogs are bad enough and ought to be
exterminated. They are the silliest beasts which one finds
uncontrolled on the roadways. Children, of course, one defers to, but
they are outrageously careless and very foolish at times, and in
short are the greatest responsibility for the driver in the small
towns of England and France. In France some effort is being made in
the schools to teach them something about a proper regard for
automobile traffic, and with good results; but no one has heard of
anything of the sort being attempted in England.

Chapter II
Travel Talk

[Illustration: Travel Talk]

Touring abroad is nothing new, but, as an amusement for the masses,
it has reached gigantic proportions. The introduction of the railroad
gave it its greatest impetus, and then came the bicycle and the
automobile.

With the railway as the sole means of getting about one was more or
less confined to the beaten track of travel in Continental Europe,
but the automobile has changed all this.

To-day, the Cote d'Azur, from St. Raphael to Menton, as well as the
strip of Norman coast-line around Trouville, in summer, is scarcely
more than a boulevard where the automobile tourist strolls for an
hour as he does in the Bois. The country lying back and between these