A WAYSIDE RECORD attention from its size, so we pulled up the better to examine it, and found this legend plainly painted thereon:—
1000 Miles
in
1000 Hours,
by Henry Girdlestone,
at the age of 56,
in the year 1844.
As, nowadays, people mostly travel by rail, this record of a past performance is wasting its information in the wilderness for want of readers, so I have been tempted to repeat the account of Mr. Henry Girdlestone's feat here.
Our road was an uneventful one; the scenery it provided was somewhat monotonous, but there was a certain inexplicable fascination about its monotony as there is in that of the sea. It had the peculiar quality of being monotonous without being wearisome. As in our drive to Crowland, what especially struck us in our drive therefrom was the sense of silence, space, and solitude. Spread out around us were leagues upon leagues of level land, like a petrified sea, that melted away imperceptibly into a palpitating blueness in which all things became blended, indistinct, or wholly lost. Leagues of grass lands and marshes, splashed here and there with vivid colour, and enlivened ever and again by the silvery gleam of still, or the sunlit sparkle of wind-stirred water; its flatness accentuated, now and again, by a solitary uprising poplar, or a lonely, lofty windmill—built high to catch every wind—and
