PREFACE. ix 



senses which remain to us, showing that we never appreciate 

 fully the blessings we enjoy until we are deprived of them. 



Although long journeys are no longer performed on high- 

 roads, except when on a driving tour, yet we make short 

 journeys on the road, either on foot, horseback, or on wheels, 

 almost every day of our lives ; the roads, in fact, we have 

 always with us, beside us, and before us — almost any one 

 living in a town has only to take half-a-dozen steps from his 

 front door, and he stands in the centre of a public roadway — 

 but the rail we use only occasionally. Into some persons' 

 lives the rail, even in these days of excessive travelling, enters 

 but very little; a journey in a train is one to be recorded; 

 the number of railway journeys performed during the year 

 can be reckoned upon the fingers of one's outstretched hand, 

 but the little journeys made to and fro upon the road are too 

 numerous for recollection. 



The chapter on Past and Present speaks of the progress 

 of civilisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 

 but the condition of the roads is perhaps one of the truest 

 indications that exist of the progress that has been made by 

 a country in the arts of civilisation. 



A traveller gives us in his book of travels his experiences 

 of being cast ashore on the coast of what he supposed was 

 either a barbarous or uninhabited country; but after having 

 walked for eleven hours without coming across a single indica- 

 tion of human occupation or habitation, or even the print of 

 a human foot, to his delight he saw a man's dead body 

 hanging from a gibbet. " My pleasure," he says, " at this 

 cheering prospect was inexpressible, for it convinced me that 

 I was in a civilised country." 



This man dangling from a gibbet was to this traveller a 

 convincing proof oi the civilisation of the country. It must 

 have been a most gratifying spectacle; at the same time I 

 venture to suppose that a good macadamised road would 

 have raised his drooping spirits to a still further height, since 

 roads in most cases lead somewhere ; and the better a road 

 is, the greater prospect there is that the place to which it 



