is more familiar with travel by rail than by road,
is marvellous in quantity and valuable as to quality.

The automobile tourist, who may be an Englishman or an American, has
hitherto been catered to with automobile novels, or love stories, or
whatever one chooses to call them, or with more or less scrappy,
incomplete, and badly edited accounts of tours made by some
millionaire possessor of a motor-car, or the means to hire one. Some
of the articles in the press, and an occasional book, have the merit
of having been "good stuff," but often they have gone wrong in the
making.

The writer of this book does not aspire to be classed with either of
the above classes of able writers; the most he would like to claim is
that he should be able to write a really good handbook on the
subject, wherein such topographical, historical, and economic
information as was presented should have the stamp of correctness.
Perhaps four years of pretty constant automobile touring in Europe
ought to count for something in the way of accumulated pertinent
information concerning hotels and highways and by-ways.

Not all automobilists are millionaires. The man of moderate means is
the real giver of impetus to the wheels of automobile progress. The
manufacturers of motor-cars have not wholly waked up to this fact as
yet, but the increasing number of tourists in small cars, both in
England and in France, points to the fact that something besides the
forty, sixty, or hundred horse-power monsters are being manufactured.

Efficiency and reliability is the great requisite of the touring
automobile, and, for that matter, should be of any other. Efficiency
and reliability cover ninety-nine per cent. of the requirements of
the automobilist. Chance will step in at the most inopportune moments
and upset all calculations, but, with due regard given to these two
great and fundamental principles, the rest does not much matter.

It is a curious fact that the great mass of town folk, in France and
probably elsewhere, still have a fear and dread of the mechanism of
the automobile. "_C'est beau la mecanique, mais c'est tout de meme un
peu complique_," they say, as they regard your labours in posing a
new valve or tightening up a joint here and there.

The development of the automobile has brought about a whole new
development of kindred things, as did the development of the
battle-ship. First there was the battle-ship, then the cruiser, and
then the torpedo-