SHOEING CATTLE! the road were formerly small but flourishing inns; and that an old farmer, aged eighty-three, who lived in an ivy-clad farmhouse a little farther on our way, well remembers sixteen mail-coaches passing Water Newton in the day: this was besides the ordinary non-mail-coaches, of which there were a number. Another reminder of other days and other ways, in the shape of a bygone custom quite novel to us, we gleaned from an old gaffer we met on the way. From him we learnt that in the pre-railway days, when the cattle were driven along the Great North Road from Scotland to the London markets, the animals were actually shod like horses so that their hoofs might stand the long journey on the hard highway. Several blacksmiths on the road moreover, we were given to understand, made a special business of shoeing such cattle apart from shoeing horses. So one travels and picks up curious bits of information. One man we saw gathering nettles assured us that, boiled, they made a delicious green vegetable, besides purifying the blood and being a cure for boils and the rheumatics. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I should not wonder some day, when their virtues are discovered, to find rich people growing them in their gardens instead of spinach and the like. Nettles be a luxury. Now, if ever you suffers from the rheumatics mind you tries nettles, they beat all the doctor's medicine; they just do." And we promised to think the matter over. The idea of any one ever growing crops of nettles in their kitchen-gardens amused us. Still the weed, vegetable I mean, may have hidden virtues
