hard to believe on a bright May morning that here, in this
blossoming, picturesque little village of Chippenham, on one bitterly
cold morning in the month of _April_, 1812, when the Bath coach
reached its posting-house (the same, perhaps, Mr. Up-to-Date
Automobilist, at which you have slept the night--worse luck), two of
its outside passengers were found frozen to death, and a third all
but dead. The old lithographs which pictured the "Royal Mail" stuck
in a snow-drift, and the unhappy passengers helping to dig it out,
are no longer apocryphal in your mind after you have heard this bit
of "real history," which happened, too, in one of England's southern
counties. The romance of other days was often stern and uncomfortable
reality of a most bitter kind.

We left Chippenham, finally, very late in the day, lost our way at
unsign-boarded and puzzling crossroads, had two punctures in a half a
dozen miles, and ultimately reached the centre of Bath, over the
North Parade Bridge--for which privilege we paid three pence, another
imposition, which, however, we could have avoided had we known the
devious turnings of the main road into town.

In two days we had covered something like two hundred and fifty miles
in and out of highways and byways, had followed the Thames for its
entire boatable length, and had crossed England,--not a very great
undertaking as automobile tours go, but a varied and enjoyable one in
spite of the restrictions put upon the free passage of automobiles by
the various governing bodies and the indifferent hotel-keepers.

Bath and its attractions for visitors are quite the best things of
their kind in all England, in spite of the fact that the attractions,
the teas, the concerts, and the lectures--to say nothing of drinking
and bathing in the waters--lack individuality.

We stayed the round of the clock at Bath, two rounds and a half, in
fact, in that we did not leave until the second morning after our
arrival, and absorbed as much of the spirit and association of the
place as was possible, including sundry gallons of the bubbling
spring-water.

Bath has pleased many critical souls, James McNeill Whistler for one,
who had no patience with other English resorts. It pleased us, too.
It was so different.

From Bath to Bristol is a dozen miles only, and the topographical
characteristics change entirely, following the banks of the little
river Avon. Bristol was a great seaport in days gone by, but today
onl