CORRESPONDENCE.
A SUMMER DRIVING-TOUR.
un THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sia,—In an article published on the 10th April last, which was calculated to attract attention from all the large number of people who are beginning to find the art of successful holiday-making one of daily increasing difficulty, and which you headed, "How to Enjoy a Short Holiday," you advised your readers to try driving about England in a pony-carriage. For my own part, I did not pay very much attention to the advice ; for knowing something of the public Press, it occurred to me that the advice was as much due to the necessity of finding a good leading idea for an article for the construction of which your contributor's own recent experience had just furnished him with some materials, as to any careful comparison of the enjoyability of different modes of travelling and any fixed preference for one of them. But my wife, who has naturally a good deal of influence over the mode in which we spend our brief intervals of enjoyment, was greatly struck by your counsel, the more, perhaps, that she has taken lately a strong aversion to the crowded tables d'hôte of Switzerland, and the long railway journeys which are necessary to carry you to that land of tourists. She immediately made up her mind that our summer holiday should not be Continental, but English ; and she speedily began to make the preliminary arrangements. A month or two ago we had no very available horse for such a holiday trip, but only two ponies, one a willing and pretty creature with two good legs, a third tolerable leg though a little spavined, and the fourth completely lame ; and the other perfectly sound and very pretty, but obstinately bent on restricting her exertions to an hour and a half a day travelled at the rate of four miles an hour at most, and who regarded heavy strokes with a rather formidable whip as weighing noth lag substantial against the more solid reasons which determined her to this resolve. Now clearly a driving-tour with either of these quadrupeds was out of the question. So not with-
out many searchings of heart on my wife's part,—for she justly observed that though the last-mentioned pony was not much in a. carriage, she was delightful to pet in the stable,—I was induced to send this pretty little sluggard back to her native hills, to turn out the lame one to grass for a couple of months, and to purchase a new horse for the intended tour. My wife had long had her eye on a neighbouring grocer's horse. Edward,' she said to me, tradesmen's horses are always safer to buy than gentlemen's ; they have less blood,' and consequently sounder nerves. Besides, they have got into good habits of standing well at the customers' doors. I cannot bear a horse that fidgets about when I want it to stand still. Then, as a rule, tradesmen are cautious persons. Butchers' boys, it is true, do drive their carts at a break-neck pace. But butchers' boys are not tradesmen. Our good grocer has an admirable white mare, which is both strong and steady. She cannot be less than ten years old, which is a good guarantee for steady habits. Make Watson an offer for it. I have the greatest confidence in him. He is a family man, and drives his wife and children about with that mare, and be would never do an imprudent thing. If he will sell you the mare, I shall be comfortable during our drive, and both my dogs can go with us. If you go to a dealer, he'll sell you an old hunter which will bolt the first time dear little Billy barks, and go lame the second day. But buy Watson's mare, and we shall be able to carry out the programme of that excellent writer in the Spectator, without fear or danger.' I remarked that the mare was too tall for our very low pony-carriage ; and I knew well that nothing would induce my wife to change her pony-carriage, which is close to the ground, for a vehicle in falling from which the accelerating' force of gravity would have more time to act in; but she over- ruled the objection. She had found out from the local carriage maker that the shafts could be raised by iron stanchions so as to fit the pony- carriage for an ordinary-sized mare, and so it was. Watson named a tolerably high price for a mare at least ten years old, especially as there were suspicions marks of a cut on one knee which pointed to an accident of some kind,—it was said to have been due to striking violently against an iron rail in a jump ;—but, still, beggars must not be choosers, and as it was my proposal and not his, that the mare should pass into my hands, I paid the price and we started for our tour in Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and perhaps Devonshire. Will you allow me to give you a little account of an experiment suggested by yourself, and carried out in conformity with your counsels ?
You, Sir, had recommended that the start should not be made from too near town, so I put the mare and trap on a rail- way, to secure that we should begin our drive in quiet and pretty country. And here I would advise those gentlemen who don't take grooms with them to look after their carriage and horse, to avoid railway operations as much as possible. First of all, it takes about three-quarters of an hour at each end of the line to get the horse-box and truck on or off. Again, the porters are very awkward in the operation of getting a horse—even a quiet tradesman's mare of a certain age—into a box. They stand round her in a crowd, under the impression probably that social sympathy will stimulate the efforts of the porter whose duty it is to urge her up the wooden inclined plane which horses seem to dislike even more than I used to dislike those problems concerning constrained motion up inclined planes which constituted the academic tortures of my youth ; and you get very hot in watch- ing their vague cries and fruitless efforts, and every minute expect one of them to get a disabling kick which will give him a claim on your compassion for life. Then, if you have to pass a junction between two distinct companies' lines, as I had, you may be quite sure that the second company will entirely decline to take on your horse-box and truck in time for the train you have determined to catch, and this even though you give them three- quarters of an hour to effect a transfer. Instead of meeting your wish, they will probably isolate your unfortunate horse-box and trap in a sort of desolate Sahara of converging rails and tramways, far from any platform or terra firma of any kind, and blandly in- form you that your property is quite safe there, and will be coupled not on to the train which is now starting,—that is impossible,— but on to one which is to start two hours later, and thatit you like to go on yourself at once, it shall be duly sent after ye* liter in the day. You look ruef idly at the distant island of horse-box, and ate quite helpless. Now, all this is very painful to a man who has lidd his plans neatly beforehand, and knows where he intended to sleep, and does not know where he can sleep if he starts on his drive at about six in the evening, and if the railway station at which he leaves the train has no eligible inns. I afterwards found other evil results from the railway journey for the trap and horse, but
and were fortunate in finding a sufficiently comfortable bin at a Hampshire village called Popham Lane,—an inn deep in the shade of stately elms,—where a lone, lorn woman admitted us under a sort of protest, stating that all the attendants of the inn were out for a holiday, and that she doubted whether she could feed us adequately. (It is a curious fact, by the way, of which I have now had some experience, that modern English innkeepers, instead of welcoming guests, frequently suspend their judgments in a most distressing way for a quarter of an hour at least on the subject of their admissibility ; and even if they do admit them, appear to look upon them as a grievance, especially if they wish to stay the night. And as the charges in such cases are never low, and the profits must be high, the phenomenon somewhat puzzles me.) However, we had, on the whole, a prosperous journey both to Popham Lane and Winchester, in which last place we spent a day
very pleasantly. The stately nave of the beautiful Cathedral, the
quaint precincts of that most cosy of Cathedral closes, the pretty river, and the picturesque hills round the city, would have delighted us, even if we had not been already so familiar in imagination with l3archester, that to make its acquaintance for the first time was like the first meeting with a literary friend. I went to the evening service —my Wife did not, for she said it would be cruel to leave the dogs alone in an inn—and fancied I could see the Rev. Septimus Harding, —that best and most delicate of all Mr. Trollope's creations, and the only one which reveals in him a certain store of poetic feeling,— creeping across the Cathedral close in his white surplice for the last time, and then encountering that "failure in the slight clerical task allotted to him" which resulted in his abandonding his clerical duty in the Cathedral, and putting off his dearly-loved garment for ever. Later, by the evening light we walked along the bank of the Itchen to " Hiram's Hospital," as Mr. Trollope calls the beautiful Hospital of St. Cross, and were shown over it by Skulpit, or Bunce, or whichever of the old Bedesmen it may have been who was deputed to this duty. The night was falling fast as we traversed the pictur- esque cloisters and went out again under the venerable gateway of St. Cross, but though a shower was coming down from the neigh- bouring hills and the beauty of the scene was dimmed, we could not help discussing how it is that Mr. Trollope's piercing eye has never, shown any of that delicacy of appreciation for natural scenery which it has shown for all the shades of qualities dis- played by men. For the walk from Winchester to St. Cross is one of true, though quiet loveliness, one Mr. Harding must have loved as dearly as he loved the cathedral chaunt or the sweet tones of his own violin. Soft meadows watered by the Itchen, with swelling, beech-covered hills rising all round, the great grey Cathedral for the central object, and St. Cross, with its ancient and most picturesque tower, and its groves hiding the somewhat squalid village from the walker's sight,—these make a picture such as Winchester boys must treasure long in their memory, even though they go from Winchester to Oxford, and merge the remem- brance of the charming scenery of the lichen, as Matthew Arnold seems to have done, in the soft and gracious neighbour- hood of the loveliest of English cities. Yet surely a school-time passed in the neighbourhood of Winchester must be as good a preparation for entering into the charm of the neighbourhood of Oxford, as familiarity with the stately old buildings of Winchester is for entering into the fascinations of the Oxford Colleges. It seemed to us that a good deal of Matthew Arnold's poetry de- scribes Winchester hardly less accurately than Oxford. At least, in that walk to St. Cross, "Thyrsis" and "the Scholar gipsy" came often to our minds. As we returned, and noticed how
"The white fog creeps from bush to bush about, The west unflushes ;"
till at last the beauty of the evening was lost in heavy rain, we were glad enough to find ourselves once more beneath the walls of the Cathedral, and threading its beautiful close, to our some- what too well-furnished inn. I say "too-well furnished" in no ascetic sense, but only because the proprietors of these establish- ments are apt to make a good deal of fuss about the entrance of wet dogs into their well-furnished rooms, and on such evenings as these, one would give up a good carpet to avoid a battle as to whether the dogs should go to the stable or not,—a decision of which it would be by no means easy for any inhabitant of the inn to hear the last, for they would probably bark all night. How- ever, though the proprietress had asked some sour questions as to the dogs early in the day, she did not witness their bedraggled entrance at night, as by a masterly flank movement we took them in at a side-door.
these I will not anticipate. Suffice it to say that we disembarked The next day we were fairly off for our first objective point in from our train much too late to reach Winchester that evening, Hampshire,—the New Forest. We drove over the downs to the pretty woody village of Hureley, passing close by the church and parsonage of the author of "The Christian Year,"--a fit retreat for that shy and tender religious genius, — dined at Romsey, where an ugly statue of Lord Pahnerston adorns the market- place, visited the splendid old Norman Abbey, which is being gradually stripped of its ugly lath-and-plaster disguises, and re- transformed into the beautiful building it once was, and now only needs a little painted glass and the pulling-down of its heavy galleries and high-backed pews to be one of the finest churches in England ; and then asked our way to Stonycross, where we should be fairly within the bounds of the New Forest. But in turning sharp back from a wrong road which we had taken, we lost a nut out of the trap, which, in all probability, the railroad journey had previously loosened, and though with no bad consequences this time, the in- cident was one which subsequent circumstances induced my wife to recall as one of the narrowly-escaped perils indigenous in your plan of campaign. As she justly remarks, the menials and hire- lings of inns are indifferent to the safety of a passing traveller's trap, and never care to examine it, or to warn the owner of its needs. And as, unfortunately, I am not a very practical person in this respect, in a carriage-journey of any distance we rim the gauntlet of many risks.
We entered the New Forest at a village called Cadnam, and found ourselves in one of the many broad roads, straight as arrows, which traverse it in various directions,—roads op- pressively straight and coherent of purpose, which though they run through the most exquisite glades, and by copses of wonderful beauty, never seem lured either to the right or to the left by any human weakness, but climb up and down hills which they might, with the greatest advantage both to eye and feet, wind round, as if it were of the first importance that the direction of the shadows of the trees beside them should play the part of the shadow of a sun-dial to the traveller who knows the points of the compass between which each road runs. And certainly such an object might well have been contemplated, for, broad and well made as the roads are, never were roads more lonely than many of these straight lines through the forest. We have sometimes driven for hours without seeing a single man of whom we could ask our way. One of these straight roads, which emerged from a thick wood on to a high and open heath, with glades of Forest sweeping away on both sides, to the north and to the south,—brought us to the solitary inn at Stonycross, where we intended to make our first considerable halt. The situation seemed to us singularly beautiful. On the south, you saw, at a distance of some sixteen or seventeen miles, the high reddish cliffs of Alum Bay and Freshwater, with wave upon wave of heath and Forest- land between. To the north, too, the vistas within vistas of blue distance, with the fainter blue or even white beyond, where the light caught distant veins of chalk, gave even more impression of a distant sea-line, than on the side where the sea really was. In fact, it was sometimes almost impossible to believe that the sky on the northern horizon was not a sea sky. Immediately around us were forests of gorse, shooting up often to the height of seven or eight feet, and between them lanes of the short, sweet turf of the downs, dotted with brilliant heather, and shining with the brightest hollies. The fern was everywhere. It seemed grafted on to the holly-stems, for the graceful fern- leaves cropped out of the very heart of the holly-trees often at five or sir feet from the ground ; and so, too, the bright heather nestled deep in the prickly gorse. And how picturesque was the animal life around our inn ! Herds of forest ponies with their foals fed not far off, and sometimes crowded round the inn for company. Flocks of geese flew screaming to the gate of the farmyard for chance sprinklings of grain. Brood asses, with fuzzy little donkeys beside them, passed and repassed. Little black pigs, of which there are large herds in the New Forest, came hustling the dogs away for stray bits of biscuit; and mighty cartloads of turf cut from the heath—the turf towering twice as high from the top of the cart as the top of the cart was from the ground,—trailed their huge shadows along the road, as the gorgeous sunset set the sky on fire towards the Dorsetsbire border. When we settled down that first day at Stonyoross, we thought your counsel, Sir, was the counsel of a Solomon. Our good tradesman's mare had done her work to perfection. She
had not bolted ; she had not shied ; she had not stumbled. She had not kicked the railway porters. She took no notice of our
shrillest dog. She stood still to admiration when the dogs wanted to come in to rest, or to jump out to run. We had reached the
historic spot where William Rufus fell under the arrow of Tyrrell, and I thought myself in every respect a fortunate as well as•A DOCILE READER.
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