y marveling,
caused the coffin to be opened to see the cause thereof. Where they found
the body to be taken away, and a black Cat very lean and deformed sitting
in the coffin, setting of great Ruffs, and frizzling of hair, to the
great fear and wonder of all beholders."

Better than this pride which forerunneth destruction, in the opinion of
Stubbes, is the habit of the Brazilian women, who "esteem so little of
apparel" that they rather choose to go naked than be thought to be proud.

As I read the times of Elizabeth, there was then greater prosperity and
enjoyment of life among the common people than fifty or a hundred years
later. Into the question of the prices of labor and of food, which Mr.
Froude considers so fully in the first chapter of his history, I shall
not enter any further than to remark that the hardness of the laborer's
lot, who got, mayhap, only twopence a day, is mitigated by the fact that
for a penny he could buy a pound of meat which now costs a shilling. In
two respects England has greatly changed for the traveler, from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century--in its inns and its roads.

In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign travelers had no choice but to ride
on horseback or to walk. Goods were transported on strings of
pack-horses. When Elizabeth rode into the city from her residence at
Greenwich, she placed herself behind her lord chancellor, on a pillion.
The first improvement made was in the construction of a rude wagon a cart
without springs, the body resting solidly on the axles. In such a vehicle
Elizabeth rode to the opening of her fifth Parliament. In 1583, on a
certain day, Sir Harry Sydney entered Shrewsbury in his wagon, "with his
trompeter blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and see." Even such
conveyances fared hard on the execrable roads of the period. Down to the
end of the seventeenth century most of the country roads were merely
broad ditches, water-worn and strewn with loose stones. In 1640 Queen
Henrietta was four weary days dragging over the road from Dover to
London, the best in England. Not till the close of the sixteenth century
was the wagon used, and then rarely. Fifty years later stage-wagons ran,
with some regularity, between London and Liverpool; and before the close
of the seventeenth century the stagecoach, a wonderful invention, which
had been used in and about London since 1650, was placed on three
principal roads of the kingdom. It averaged two to three miles an hou