hey travelled--most uncomfortably, be it
remarked--by stage-coach and suffered all the inclemencies of bad
weather _en route_ without a word of protest but a genial grumble,
which they sought to antidote by copious libations of anything liquid
and strong. The automobile has changed all this. The traveller by
automobile doesn't resort to alcoholic drinks to put, or keep, him in
a good humour, and, when he sees a lumbering van or family cart
making its way for many miles from one widely separated region to
another, he accelerates his own motive power and leaves the good old
ways of the good old days as far behind as he can, and recalls the
words of Sidney Smith:

"The good of other times let others state,
I think it lucky I was born so late."

A certain picturesqueness of travel may be wanting when comparing the
automobile with the whirling coach-and-four of other days, but there
is vastly more comfort for all concerned, and no one will regret the
march of progress when he considers that nothing but the means of
transportation has been changed. The delightful prospects of hill and
vale are still there, the long stretches of silent road and, in
France and Germany, great forest routes which are as wild and
unbroken, except for the magnificent surface of the roads, as they
were when mediaeval travelers startled the deer and wild boar. You may
even do this to-day with an automobile in more than one forest tract
of France, and that not far from the great centres of population
either.

The invention of carriage-springs--the same which, with but little
variation, we use on the automobile--by the wife of an apothecary in
the Quartier de St. Antoine at Paris, in 1600, was the prime cause of
the increased popularity of travel by road in France.

In 1776, the routes of France were divided into four categories:
1. Those leading from Paris to the principal interior cities and
seaports.

2. Those communicating directly between the principal cities.

3. Those communicating directly between the cities and towns of one
province and those of another.

4. Those serving the smaller towns and bourgs.

Those in the first class were to be 13.35 metres in width, the second
11.90, the third 10, the fourth 7.90. The road makers and menders of
England and America could not get better models than these.

The advent of the automobile has brought a new factor into the matter
of road making and mending, but certainly he would be an igno