of the scenery by the varied effects they produced on the landscape. A gleamy day is a picture-making and picture-suggesting day, as artists full well know. By the time we reached Hatfield the sun above had obtained complete mastery of the situation, and was doing his best to make all things below pleasant for us.
At Hatfield we pulled up at another "Red Lion," and there we elected to rest a while and "refresh the inner man," as the country-paper reporters have it, for our halt at Barnet was solely for the benefit of our horses. In the coffee-room we found a party of four gentlemen lunching; laughing and talking, their conversation was carried on in so loud a tone of voice that, willing or unwilling, we could not help hearing nearly all they said; their jovial jokes they made public property, and the general good-humour and enjoyment of the party was quite infectious. Manifestly they had no fear of strangers overhearing their tales and talk, which rather surprised us, as sundry anecdotal reminiscences of famous personages were freely related, which, if one could only have felt sure of their veracity, would have been most entertaining. It was indeed a right merry, possibly an inventive, and certainly a rather noisy, quartet. Truly the various people that the road-*traveller comes in contact with from time to time often dispute interest with the scenery. As Sir Arthur Helps says, "In travel it is remarkable how much more pleasure we obtain from unexpected incidents than from deliberate sight-seeing," and it certainly appears to me that a driving tour specially
