The motor-car may become a land yacht with more variety of scenery than its marine prototype, and an absence of the frequent disconcerting motion peculiar to the sea. I do not at all depreciate the pleasure of travelling over a beautiful country in a railway. No one who has looked down from the Brenner Pass into Italy, no one who has climbed up the spiral line to Andermatt, or who has speeded over the sunny plains of France or even the expanses of Russia, at least in the luxury Russian railway-carriages afford, will doubt that railways can give an adequate experience of scenery of a grand and far-reaching character. But what do they know of England who only England know from the window of a railway-carriage?—the great plain or valley, even with its sunlit varieties of grass and corn and wood, contributes only a small part of the beauty which England has to show, but which she declines to disclose to the railway-traveller.
The voyager by road thinks less of a great expanse of scenery, bounded though it may be by the long waving line of mysterious hills, than he does of the thousand sights of beauty and interest under his eyes. A railway has no foreground, unless telegraph posts on an embankment half-clothed, and not at all ashamed, can be said to constitute such a feature. To a road and the traveller on it the foreground is everything. The hedges, the trees dappling the road with shade and sunshine, the cottages, the village greens and ponds, the village itself through which we pass with a fleeting interest in its life, the glimpses down side lanes into their infinite suggestions of light and colour—these are sights repeated in the endless variety of nature and rural life, and of which the changeful pleasure is unending. I am not sure whether the motor-car is as popular in the rural districts as it is, or at least I believe was, in France, but I fancy that to-day, if we choose, we shall not find our neighbour anything but cordial. We revive in these later days very much of the spirit of the old coaches, and we may perhaps revive something of the interest in them of the country inns and the people of the country. Speaking again
