heron rising slowly from his fishing station, An easy half-day's rowing brought us to and flopping majestically away from our Pewsey one of the discoveries of our intrusive presence. Human anglers, ex-voyage. It was marked in small type on cept in the neighbourhood of towns, were the map; and we knew it not by fame, as rare; and of voyagers bent on a task like we knew Marlborough on the one side, our own we saw none at all. and Devizes on the other. We pictured it a mere village, with rough beer-shop accommodation; but we found it a trim, well-ordered place, neither town nor village, with a very phoenix of an inn. The Salisbury Avon flows through the main street, and here begins its work of flourmilling before it descends to the plain. All around are high-down ridges, which seemed to promise magnificent ground for a gallop over the springy turf in some of the finest air in England. Truly, if Pewsey were in Germany, it would boast a big hotel or two; and dozens of "Concordias," and "Tivolis," and "Germanias," painted green and white, and smothered with hops and Virginia creeper; and a brass-band, and all the necessary adjuncts of a Luftkurort. We halted at Newbury and again at Hungerford, and up to the last-named town the scenery has just the same characteristics; but the next day's work brought us into a different region. The Kennet no longer kept us company, and we passed the Berkshire border into Wilts. The trees grew rarer; rolling downs instead of level meadows bounded our course; we passed by chalk pits instead of sedge beds, tokens that we were rowing in regions where nature never intended men to row. We had already passed through some fiveand-forty locks, and now a series of nine close together at Crofton lifted us to the summit level more than five hundred feet above the sea. At the entrance of Savernake tunnel we left our boat in charge of the railway signalman, and, by way of a change, took a spell of wheel locomotion through the forest, by driving to Marlborough, our next resting-place. The entrance to Savernake may well disappoint any one looking for real forest wildness. All round about the house-a melancholy-looking pile-it is mere park, with no touch of the "selva selvaggia"; but, after traversing the long avenue of lofty beeches, the most perfect example of the forest aisle, one emerges in a different woodland world. Hoary giants, oak and beech, contending for supremacy, rise from dense thickets of underwood. The surface is abrupt and broken thickly-wooded crests, with valleys of rough pasture between. In the low ground the rabbits dart about from one furze-bush to another in the way the sportsman loves, and herds of cattle wander at will, and lie lazily under some of the finest forest-timber in Britain, trees which might easily date back to Stuart times; and, with slight effort after illusion, one might call up a vision of a troop of mailed horsemen disappearing through the "verdurous gloom." The tall red-deer are still there to aid the fancy in a flight back to days yet more remote, for Savernake is one of their few remaining haunts south of the Tweed, and there they have as yet evaded the fate which seems to be shadowed forth from the motto of melancholy suggestion which one reads on the heraldic shield of the lodge gate. Devizes is a handsome town, chiefly remarkable for the "Bear Hotel "-never had bear a kindlier growl-where Sir Thomas Lawrence first gave evidence of his talent, and for a monument in the marketplace which records how a lady fell down. dead after telling a falsehood over the sale of a sack of corn. As we gazed upon this obelisk, and read its warning inscription, the question arose whether locomotion in Devizes market-place-or, indeed, in any market-place- would be possible, supposing that a stony record should be built to mark the place where deviation from veracity, in the course of a bargain, has not been followed by the instant death of the teller of the taradiddle. Since the But more interesting to us, as voyagers, than any objects usually dealt with in guide-books, was the series of descending locks which lay just ahead. Twenty-nine locks in less than two miles! day of embarkation we had been reminded by many commentators on our venture, with a knowing twinkle of the eye, that we would find the Devizes locks a pretty tough job. They are a formidable obstacle, no doubt, to the laden barge, or the house-boat; but we, in our light-going order, were able to turn the position, instead of storming it, by engaging an obliging wharfman to cart our boat over to the bottom of the watery staircase. It was a little like shirking work, perhaps ; and one of the crew, who seemed to find the cream of life's happiness in working sluices, and opening and shutting lock-canal is carried from one side to the other gates, was very scornful on the subject. on an aqueduct, and every turn of the Still, we saved four hours by our course brings to view some fresh charm of manoeuvre; and the five locks at Seend, landscape. But the air. of this winding and the four more at Semington, and the valley is hot and stifling, and in the oak intervening distance to Bradford gave us a woods the flies rage in a fashion truly very fair day's work. Egyptian. We long as we sit at the labouring oar for a breath of the air of Pewsey downs, and murmurs arise from certain of the crew that it would be well to return thither instead of braving suffocation in the sweltering streets of Bath. Bradford-on-Avon is certainly one of the most interesting and peculiar towns in England. The well-informed man knows only one Bradford, and that is in Yorkshire-a great centre of the woollen trade. Should you tell him that there is also a Bradford in Wiltshire, he will possibly admit the proposition; but should you go on to say that this southern Bradford made cloth when its smoky northern namesake was a mere moorland village, and still turns out a quality which the Yorkshireman, with all his push and capital, cannot equal, he will tell you you are talking nonsense. Yet so it is. Though, like Frome and Melksham and Westbury, it has suffered by the rise of Trowbridge, it still produces cloth of the finest quality; but it was not as a weaver's town that it claimed our interest. We came rather to see the tiny church of Saint Aldhelm, the oldest place of worship in Great Britain, teste Professor Freeman, and I should like to know who would dare to contradict such an authority. The little church, as it now stands, is an admirable instance of successful restoration, and is as little changed as may be from its original state. But it is by no means the only object to gladden the eye of the archæologist. At every turn one comes across fine bits of Jacobean or Queen Anne work, roomy-looking houses built of that stone which becomes ruddy brown with age like the face of a sound-bodied, kindly. souled, old man. The streets are quite steep enough to produce pretty often an inclination to stop and look at the scenery, and the houses stand in terraces, built one above the other, along the slopes of the semicircular deflection in the hill-side. In passing from one level to another, one often has to traverse alleys which might be parts of some Italian hill town. Gardens, fall of vegetables and bright with flowers, lie before almost every door, and make it hard to believe that we are, after all, in the midst of an English manufacturing town. The bit of canal between Bradford and Bath is certainly the gem of the voyage. On one side sloping woods come down to the water's edge, and the Avon flows far below us along the valley. Twice the Bath certainly is the last place in England where people, wearing what were emphatically working suits of boatingflannel, would find themselves at home; so, after a day's repose, we gladly took ship again, and returned on our track as far as Semington, the junction with the Wilts and Berks canal. As we entered the first long narrow lock, it seemed a mere toy affair after the huge ones we were leaving. This new bit of country is rich with all the quiet, happy characteristics of Southern English scenery. In the level lush pastures, studded with noble trees, the sleek, sleepy cattle live what must surely be lives of ideal happiness. Drowsy as they seemed to be, they were yet curious enough to saunter slowly up to the canal to stare at us. Pleasure-boats are evidently rare in these parts, for should a child catch sight of us he would summon all his mates within ear-shot to come and look at the little ship; and in the lovely fields were The mowers, who, as the tiny swell Of our boat passing swayed the river grass, Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass. Occasionally they would give us a humorous invitation to get out of that boat and come and help them to clear up that field of wheat. On the left the Bristol Avon still kept us company, and on the right were the sloping woods of Bowood ; but, after passing Wootton Bassett, the presence of numerous anglers on the towing-path-oily, grimy men who looked as if they might recently have been cleaning engines-warned us that we were emerging These from the purely rural districts. anglers, however, were urbane only in a limited sense. We got from them no kindly good-day or jocular remark-as from the reed cutters, and shepherds, and harvestmen we had hitherto met - but lowering looks and muttered objurgations on people who came with boats, and spoilt the fishing. They were all fishing with live bait; and, as far as I could see, they put very much more weight of fish into the water than ever they took out of it. There must have been at least a hundred wretched impaled dace and gudgeon for one pike to select from, supposing, that is, that a single pike were foolish enough to abide in the unsavoury neighbourhood of Swindon, Perhaps it was even baffled hope which made them so grumpy; but their mode of life might well have had something to do with it. Can men who live all day long in the grime, and fume, and whirr of a steam workshop, possibly put forth those gentilities of manner, none the less real for the hearty roughness of their mode of expression, which come naturally to the workers in the open fields; or, at least, to those of them we came across? When I had travelled a little farther, and saw the town of New Swindon, the dwelling-place of these saturnine fishers, I fell into a more forgiving mood. Were I fated to live there, I am sure I should be as gloomy as the gloomiest of them, and very possibly might violently assault any boating excursionists who came to disturb my fishing. There is a current belief that civilisation owes much to railways, and if this belief be a valid one, the Great Western, as a railway, is an agent of culture and enlightenment, and deserves a good word from the friends of progress; but as far as I could see in my tramp along the towingpath through New Swindon, there is a huge debit item on the other side, on account of the erection of this amorphous congeries of houses. The canal, which was pure enough a few miles back, here becomes a foul, black ditch, running close past the back doors of rows of mean, ugly houses, every one of which, by the indulgence, I suppose, of whatever sanitary authority may exist in the place, maintains a feculent dust heap. These lie in almost a continuous line along the bank, in hideous contrast to the blossom and greenery of the tangled hedges which have hitherto bordered our path. Crowds of frightened ducks scuttled away from our intrusive boat over the water black as Styx, and the odours disengaged by their flight were more suggestive of a Venetian than a Wiltshire canal. A few years ago this spot was fair and pure as the fields a few miles back. Men will multiply, and places like New Swindon will spring up; but there is surely no reason why their early stages of growth should be so unseemly. A large portion of the evil springs from the carelessness and want of control and design which has hitherto characterised our public life. If the dose of democratic mixture lately administered to local government leads to an increase of supervision of the right sort, the rural revolution will not have come in vain. For two miles at least the plague of man's defiling presence was visible, and it was not till after the first lock on the North Wilts Canal, a short cut from Swindon to the Thames and Severn Canal, at Cricklade, had been passed, that we came back to quiet and greenery. This last-named waterway, when we floated into it through the last lock, seemed a spacious stream indeed after the narrow, weed-grown channel we had traversed since Wootton Bassett. Down to Lechlade it is a pretty, tranquil landscape, though not to be compared with the golden valley at its other extremity, or with the Upper Thames reach between New Bridge and Bablock Hythe. Here it seems time to turn off the itinerary tap, as the Thames above Oxford, in spite of the sparseness of inns and the paucity of accommodation in the few there are, is becoming well known to boating people, especially those who are growing a trifle weary of the humours of Henley and Maidenhead. If some one with a gift that way were to address himself to the task, he might find as good material for a volume of travel, duly spiced and salted with statistics and social philosophy, in a jaunt like ours, as he would ever get from a long vacation trip to the States, or a progress through the Australian colonies, made under the patronage of some high official, with all the rough places smoothed down in the usual way. Nearly every afternoon you land at one of those little country towns, which the coming of the railway was to have made as Tyre and Sidon, and spend the night in one of those English inns, the merits of which often furnish matter for discussion in the public press during the holiday season. When the railways made a sudden end of the mail coaches, the small country towns certainly seemed likely to fall beyond recovery. People who still had money to spend rushed off to spend it in the county town; or, still worse, in London, lured by the charm of change, or by the extraordinary experience of travelling fifteen miles an hour. came to the inn instead of ten, and even this solitary one grew to be so uncertain and fleeting in his movements that it was One guest hardly worth while to provide victuals for his sustenance, so that it was no uncommon experience for the adventurous traveller to find no better fare in the leading inn of a country town than bread and cheese. The long range of coach-houses and stables fell to ruin; ruin also seemed likely at no distant date to overtake the house itself, and the landlord not unfrequently hastened this on by consuming too much of his own liquor, to make him forget the evil days upon which he had fallen. But the Englishman, whether he lives in London, or in a country town, or in some half-savage colony, is equally incapable of knowing when he is beaten. The railways, no doubt, for a time turned things topsy-turvy; and in the forties the country tradesmen were as men dazed, and unable to grapple with the situation. But they, or their successors, recovered their wits after a time; and it may safely be said that, as a class, they are better off now than ever they were. The shops, in spite of the arrival of co-operative packing-cases addressed to local magnates of frugal mind, are well supplied, and, even in the villages, show signs of doing a good business. The butchers' shops are full of meat, and so are the grocers'. After all one has read about the prejudice against tinned meats, and the dangers of eating them, it is astonishing to look upon the long ranges and tall pyramids of beef and brawn in every grocer's window. The prejudice against it must be waning, and the contents of the tins cannot be so noxious, after all. The universality of the ready-made clothes'-shop accounts for the disappearance of the smock-frock, and for the existence of those industrial abuses in the London tailoring trade, about which Royal Commissioners have collected evidence and reported, if they have done nothing else. There is generally some builder's work in progress, and all about the place an air of trimness and neatness, which is one of the surest evidences of prosperity. The Athenæum, or the readingroom, is there to prove a certain amount of intellectual movement; and there is evidence, from the sight of some familiar posters on the walls, that one would have the chance, now and then, of seeing the same acrobatic and spectacular shows which at other times are the delight of London folk Much has been written on the evils of centralisation, and on the malignant part which railways have played in promoting it; but all this is ludicrously exaggerated. A Frenchman once declared that Englishmen were not merely insular, but islands in themselves. "Every Englishman is an island;" few truer epigrams have ever been spoken. It is not to be supposed that Fallowthorpe and Meadbury-towns made up of incorrigible individualists of the type described by the witty Frenchman-would ever suffer themselves to be assimilated and controlled by the larger congeries of the county town, or of London. There is just the same corporate feeling, just the same pride in the particular spot of earth in respect of which they pay rates and taxes, amongst English country townsmen now as there was in the days when stage-coaches ran, or in those remote ones when the same word was used to describe the stranger and the foe. They have stuck to their posts, as the British soldier sticks to his when he finds himself in a tight place, and have let city people see that they are quite well able to take care of themselves, in spite of the uphill game they have had to play. But, after all, the inn is the feature of the country town which has the most vital interest for the wayfarer. English innkeepers are reputed to be strongly conservative, and to this view any one who has visited necessarily a score or so of English inns will agree. Our trip for a good part of its course lay well off the beaten track; and we assuredly did not fare the worse on that account. Our food was invariably abundant, and well cooked; and the friendly service of the pleasant, willing waitress made us hope that she may, after all, be able to survive the competition of the ubiquitous "Fritz." So far, there is little room for adverse criticism; but the reverse of the medal must, in justice, be exhibited. Considering how we English pride ourselves on our national cleanliness, and what hard things we have to say of the dirt of other lands, it is a little surprising that the one well-nigh universal failing of the English inn should be the want of freshness, or, to put it plainly, the frowsiness of its bedrooms. They may be clean, but they don't look like it. If you open a drawer or a wardrobe, you will surely discover a plentiful assortment of fusty garments, belonging presumably to the landlady or her assistants. The carpets will be faded and frayed; the curtains ragged and inefficient; the water-bottle furred and suggestive of germs and microbes; and the atmosphere -though our national passion for fresh | Under conditions of this sort it is not to be air is as strong as that for cold water stuffy, and nothing short of it. It is hard to find a reason for this prevalent dinginess, especially as the hostess and her maids will be as neat as one could wish. Perhaps the easiest explanation of it is, that it is part of the ingrained conservatism of the British Boniface, which leads him to believe that the air of the bedrooms and the water of the jugs are, like the fundamentals of the British Constitution, best unchanged. The question of charges opens a wide field. A correspondence thereanent was started in the journals last year, and in this the English landlord, as compared with his Continental brother, did not seem to get much the worst of it, and in truth his adversaries did not put their case with much skill or cogency. A gentleman who had once lived well in a Swiss pension for seven francs a day, wrote saying that he considered twelve and sixpence a high charge for a day's stay in an English hotel. It would have been more to the purpose if he had given the cost of a similar flying visit to the ordinary Swiss hotel, or a week's stay in an English boarding-house, remembering always that in England few people are content with the plain first breakfast they enjoy on the Continent. Still, when all allowances are made, the fact remains that Englishmen have not the faculty for hotel-keeping which Germans and Swiss have, a fact which will help to account for the vast gulf which lies between the hotels of the Thames and Oxford, and those of the Rhine and Heidelberg. It is generally admitted in political economy that men engaged in agreeable and healthful callings must be content with smaller profits than those which attach to occupations pursued under conditions of discomfort or obloquy, and of agreeable callings I can think of none to beat that of the landlord of the chief hotel and posting-house of a country town. Those I came across seemed to have all the enjoyments of a country gentleman's life without his worries. They probably manage the stable and select the liquors of the house, but all the cares of active administration seem to lie in the hands of the landlady and "Miss." They nearly all belong to the local troop of Yeomanry, and something in the cut of the trousers told me that they would be pretty regular at the cover side in the hunting season. supposed that rapid fortunes are to be made, and it is hinted that the pleasures of life occasionally operate to keep those two fateful ends from meeting, and to prevent the landlord from extending his business as his less easy-going and more enterprising fellows have done. The demand for accommodation is really greater than ever it was. The crowds of cyclists who now throng the coach roads must spend quite as much as the mailcoach passengers spent, and on the slightest excuse the townsman is ready to set forth in a break, with a dozen other spirits as jovial as himself, to another town a dozen miles away, just for the pleasure of the drive and the dinner at the end. This all means more money circulating in the landlord's business, which would certainly have expanded to something much beyond its present volume had he held to the wholesome maxim of "business first, pleasure afterwards." Until the controversy about the Manchester Ship Canal, a few years ago, people seemed to have forgotten that such methods of transit as canals existed at all. They were taken to be included in the list of those things which "had been done away with by the railroads "; but the inception of this great work, and the appointment of a Royal Commission on inland navigation, and the late Railway and Canal Act, have revealed the fact that there are hundreds of miles of waterway, over which heavy, rough goods can be carried, though slowly, more economically than over iron rails. One has heard hints in plenty that the railways have deliberately let those canals, over which they have acquired rights, fall to ruin in order to safeguard their monopoly, and the destruction of the upper navigation on the Warwickshire Avon, and the ruinous state into which the Thames and Severn Canal was falling a few years ago, certainly lent a degree of plausibility to this assertion; but to judge from the experience of our voyage, the Railway Canals are in a better condition than those which are independent. The Kennet and Avon navigation, the property of the Great Western Railway, is a fine, well-kept channel from end to end, and a fair amount of traffic still passes over it between Devizes and Bristol by a regular service of boats; whereas the Wilts and Berks, an independent undertaking, is, over a large portion of its course, half-choked with weeds and, from a neglect of dredging, too |