two widely separated points is becoming known, and even modern taste
prefers the idyllic countryside to a round of the same dizzy
conventions that one gets in season at Paris, London, or New York.

France is the land _par excellence_ for automobile touring, not only
from its splendid roads, but from the wide diversity of its sights
and scenes, and manners and customs, and, last but not least, its
most excellent hotels strung along its highways and byways like
pearls in a collarette.

This is not saying that travel by automobile is not delightful
elsewhere; certainly it is equally so in many places along the Rhine,
in Northern Italy, and in England, where the chief drawback is the
really incompetent catering of the English country hotel-keeper to
the demands of the traveller who would dine off of something more
attractive than a cut from a cold joint of ham, and eggs washed down
with stodgy, bitter beer.

The bibliography of travel books is long, and includes many famous
names in literature. Marco Polo, Froissart, Mme. de Sevigne, Taine,
Bayard Taylor, Willis, Stevenson, and Sterne, all had opportunities
for observation and made the most of them. If they had lived in the
days of the automobile they might have sung a song of speed which
would have been the most melodious chord in the whole gamut.

A modern writer must be more modest, however. He can hardly hope to
attract attention to himself or his work by describing the usual
sights and scenes. The most he can do is to set down his method of
travel, his approach, and his departure, and, for example, to tell
those who may come after that the great double spires of Notre Dame
de Chartres are a beacon by land for nearly twenty kilometers in any
direction, as he approaches them by road across the great plain of La
Beauce, the granary of France, rather than give a repetition of the
well-worn guidebook facts concerning them.

[Illustration: Ideal Car]

Chartres is taken as an example because it is one of those "stock"
sights, before mentioned, which any itinerary coming within the scope
of the _grand tour_ is bound to include.

Almost the same phenomenon is true of Antwerp's lacelike spire, the
great Gothic wonder of Cologne and, to a lesser extent, that of
Canterbury in England; thus the automobilist _en route_ has his
beacons and landmarks as has the sailor on the seas.

Man is an animal essentially mobile. He moves readily from place to
place and is not tied dow