ll day doing it, loafing along over a heather-strewn plain and
lunching at the Hotel Huna (the significance of which name we forgot
to ask.)

[Illustration: Wick, Inverness and John O'Groats]

This ended our run to the North, five days in all, not a very
terrific speed or a very venturesome proceeding, but as good a test
of one's knowledge of how to keep his machine running as can be got
anywhere. It was a sort of rapid review of many things of which we
had hitherto only a scrappy, fragmentary knowledge, and is a trip
which should not be omitted from any one's grand European itinerary
if one has the time and means of covering it.

Part IV
In Belgium, Holland, And Germany

Chapter I
On The Road In Flanders

[Illustration: Flanders]

There has been a noticeable falling off in touring in Belgium. There
is no reason for this except the caprice of fashion, and the
automobile and its popularizing influence will soon change all this,
in spite of the abominable stretches of paved highroads, which here
and there and everywhere, and most unexpectedly, crop up and shake
one almost to pieces, besides working dire disaster to the mechanical
parts of one's automobile. The authorities are improving things, but
it will be some time yet before Belgium is as free from _pave_ as is
France.

The good roads of Belgium are as good as those anywhere to be found,
and it is only the unlooked for and distressingly frequent stretches
of paved highway which need give any concern.

The natives speak French--of a sort--here and there in Belgium, but
they also speak Flemish and Walloon.

We left Paris by the Route de Belgique, crossed the frontier at
Givet, and made our first stop at Rethel, 193 kilometres away, where
we passed the night, at the Hotel de France. For a town of less than
six thousand people Bethel is quite a metropolis. It has a grand
establishment known as the Societe d'Automobiles Bauchet, which will
cater for any and every want of the automobilist, and has a
half-dozen sights of first rank, from the old Hotel Dieu to the
bizarre doubled-up Eglise St. Nicolas and the seventeenth-century,
wood-roofed market-house.

Sorbon, four kilometres away, is the birthplace of Robert Sorbon, the
founder of the Sorbonne at Paris, and is a classic excursion which is
never omitted by true pilgrims who come to Rethel.

Fifty-three kilometres from Rethel is Rocroi, a name which means
little to most strangers in France. It is near th