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and hay, being carried in this way for short distances A set of people known by the name of cadgers, who have given a word to our slang dictionaries, plied regularly between different places, selling salt, fish, poultry, eggs, and earthenware. These things were carried on pack-horses, in sacks or baskets suspended on each side of the animal. In carrying goods between distant places it was necessary to employ a cart, as all that a horse could carry on his back was not sufficient to pay for a long journey. These carriers, if we include delays, often went at the rate of a quarter of a mile an hour! Mr. J. R. McCulloch records it as a fact that the common carrier from Selkirk to Edinburgh, thirty-eight miles distant, required a fortnight for his journey between the two places, going and returning! The road, it must be said, was originally one of the most dangerous in the whole country, for a large part of it lay in the bottom of a district called Gala-water, from the name of the chief stream, the channel of the water being, when not flooded, the track chosen as the most level, and the easiest to travel in.

Between the largest cities, says the same authority, the means of travelling were very little better. In 1678, an agreement was made to run a coach between Edinburgh and Glasgow, a distance of forty-four miles, which was to be drawn by six horses, and to perform the journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh and back in six days. Even a century later it took a day and a half for the stage-coach to travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

and rob him by the most feeble contrivance. The French mail was often stopped on its road to Dover by a piece of string stretched across the entrance of Kent-street, Borough. This caught the horse's legs, caused him to stumble, and throw the postboy off, who returned to the chief office, and coolly reported the loss of his mail-bags. Rural postmen were always ready to be robbed by any stranger who appeared on the road, and it was long before stage-coachmen, fed, as they were, with lying stories about the daring of fancy highwaymen, had courage not to stand and deliver at the first impudent summons. The feather-beds, so liberally franked at the expense of the country, were very often carried off into criminal bondage, and few taxpayers can help rejoicing at this punishment of their enemies.

MR. SAMUEL SMILES, in his recent Lives of the Engineers, has collected from various sources a number of amusing details about English roads and road-travelling in the last century. In 1690, Lord Chancellor Cowper politely described Sussex as a "sink of about fourteen miles broad." People in some parts. used to travel by swimming; and it was almost as difficult for old people to get to church in Sussex during winter as it was in the Lincoln Fens, where they rowed there in boats. Fuller once saw an old lady being drawn to church in her own coach by the aid of six oxen. The Sussex roads were so bad as to pass into a by-word. A contemporary says that in travelling through a slough of extraordinary miryness, it used to be called "the Sussex bit As late as 1763, there was but one stage- of the road;" and he satirically adds, that the coach from Edinburgh to London, which set reason why the Sussex girls were so long-limbed out once a month, taking from twelve to four-was because of the tenacity of the mud in that teen days to perform the journey. In 1830, six or seven coaches set out each day from both ends on the same road, and the time for executing the journey was reduced to about fortyeight hours. Now, it is almost needless to say, that by the Post-office limited mail express train, we may travel the same distance on a comfortable couch in ten hours and a half.

At this time the "franking" of letters was a valuable privilege conceded to members of parliament, and others in authority, and largely used for the accommodation of their friends. The Post-office managers complain very loudly of the strange articles at present sent through the post, but in those days their complaints were much louder. The "franking," which began with letters, gradually extended to small parcels; from small parcels it got to cover large ones, and at last the mail-carriers were very much shocked at seeing a huge feather-bed registered as a free letter. Inquiry, indignation, an improved system of mail-carrying, the extension of population and correspondence, and reduced charges for postage, at last put an end to the franking privilege.

While almost anybody could rob the post through this abused "free-list," the poor mails were just as ill-treated on the road. The most feeble thief of the day could rob a postboy,

county; the practice of pulling the foot out of it by the strength of the ankle tending to stretch the muscle and lengthen the bone.

The roads in the neighbourhood of London were as bad as those in Sussex. Chertsey was a two days' journey from town; and Lord Hervey, writing from Kensington in 1736, says: "The road from this place to London is so infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast upon a rock in the middle of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud." Royal carriages stuck fast in the mud for hours together, defying all efforts to remove them.

It was only a few of the main roads out of London that were in any way practicable for coaches. On the occasion of any state visits, labourers went before the royal train to mend the ways. Judges were thrown into bog-holes while going on circuit, and kept the juries waiting while they were being dug out. Sometimes they fell into sloughs, and had to be hauled out by plough-horses.

It was said, in 1752, that a Londoner would no more think of travelling into the west of England for pleasure, than of going to Nubia. Of all the cursed roads," says Arthur Young in 1769, "that ever disgraced this kingdom in

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the very ages of barbarism, none ever equalled that from Billericay to Tilbury. It is for near twelve miles so narrow that a mouse cannot pass by any carriage. I saw a fellow creep under his waggon to assist me to lift, if possible, my chaise over a hedge. To add to all the infamous circumstances which occur to plague a traveller, I must not forget the eternally meeting with chalk waggons, themselves frequently stuck fast, till a collection of them are in the same situation, and twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out, one by one." In Essex, generally, he found the roads full of ruts" of an incredible depth;" he found the turnpike-road between Bury and Sudbury, in Suffolk, as bad "as any unmended lane in Wales;" full of ponds of liquid dirt, and horse-laming flints. Between Titsworth and Oxford he found the turnpike-road, as it was called, abounding in loose stones, as large as a man's head, and full of holes, and deep ruts; from Gloucester to Newnham, a distance of twelve miles, he found another "cursed road," "infamously stony, with ruts all the way;" and from Newnham to Chepstow he describes the road as a series of hills, like "the roofs of houses joined."

Going to the north, a short time afterwards, this unfortunate but observant traveller found the roads no better in that quarter. Between Richmond and Darlington they were "like to dislocate his bones;" and when he has to speak of the roads in Lancashire, he foams with rage. He cautions us to avoid them as we would the Evil One, for he measured ruts in them four feet deep, that were full of floating mud.

The roads in the Midland Counties, and in Kent, were no better. When Mr. Rennie, the engineer, was engaged in surveying the Weald with a view to the cutting of a canal through it in 1802, he found the country almost destitute of practicable roads.

In Northamptonshire, the only way of getting along some of the main roads in rainy weather was by swimming. Even now it is no uncommon thing, as I can testify by personal observation, to find miles of the railway from Blisworth to Peterborough under water during the wet season. All over the country inland light houses land beacons - were humanely stationed to keep benighted travellers out of quagmires, ponds, and bogs. In Staffordshire, before the great network of canals was made, the roads were so bad, and so much like roads in every other part of the kingdom, that the carriage of earthenware in panniers was one shilling per ton per mile, or eight shillings for a journey of ten miles. This, too, was in the days of the great artist-manufacturer-Wedgwood.

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planted by stage-coaches about 1650. waggons crawled along, perhaps, at the rate of ten miles in twelve hours, but the stage-coaches, with much jolting, were able to reach four miles an hour. The waggons were solid, slow, and sale, while the coaches were high and unsafe, and their drivers were drunken bullies. No change in the mode of travelling was carried out without a noisy agitation against it. Class interests were as clamorous then as they are now, and as desirous that their particular business should be regarded as beyond improvement.

The condition of the road to York in the last century is never considered in the popular account of Dick Turpin's half-legendary ride. He is represented mounted on a fiery blood mare, leaping over carts and toll-bars, and flying along a hard, smooth ground granite road, like a jockey at Epsom. This is the fancy picture, and it is almost a pity to disturb it. The York road in most places was like those which made Arthur Young so savage; and bold Turpin's pace may have been a broken amble of four miles an hour.

In 1754 the first "flying coach" was established by a knot of Manchester men to run between that town and London. Their notion of "flying" was to do the journey in four days and a half, and yet this moderate speed was looked upon with distrust. Lord Campbell tells us that he was warned not to travel by Palmer's improved mail-coaches, the first vehicles that ventured upon eight miles an hour, towards the close of the last century. He was told of certain passengers who had come through by these coaches from Edinburgh to London, and had died of apoplexy from the rapidity of the motion. This eight miles an hour was afterwards increased to ten or twelve, with the improvement in the leading lines of road; and at the latter point the rate of fast travelling stopped, until the best road of all was made-the railroad.

The railway reports, just issued by the Board of Trade, give us a full statistical account of what our railroads now are. The miles opened ' in 1860 for regular traffic in the United Kingdom were nearly ten thousand five hundred. The travellers during the same year, also in the United Kingdom, were one hundred and sixty. || three millions and a half, besides nearly fifty thousand holders of season tickets, who probably made many journeys. Altogether there must have been nearly six journeys in the year for each member of our population. The trains of all kinds travelled more than one hundred and two millions of miles, or more than four thousand times round the world. Three hundred and fifty-seven thousand and more dogs, and Modes of travelling changed with the gradual over a quarter of a million of horses, made railimprovement of the roads. The foot passengers way journeys during the same period. The occasionally took to horse, while ladies rode on goods traffic represented the carriage of over pillions, or in horse-litters. Pack-horses gave twelve millions of cattle, sheep, and pigs, and way to carriers' carts and waggons, and the nearly ninety millions of tons of minerals and! latter heavy rumbling vehicles, which did more general merchandise. The receipts of our railto wear out good roads than any monsters ever ways, from all kinds of traffic, were nearly framed by coach-builders, were largely sup-twenty-eight millions sterling (equal to the

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interest on our national debt), a little less than one-half of which came from passengers and the mails, and the rest, or largest half, from goods. The expenditure of the companies was about forty-seven per cent of the gross receipts, leaving fourteen millions and a half sterling as the net receipts. The compensation paid for accidents and losses amounted to a little over one hundred and eighty-one thousand pounds. The rolling stock comprised five thousand eight hundred locomotives, over fifteen thousand passenger engines, and nearly one hundred and eighty-one thousand waggons for goods. Comparing 1860 with 1859, the passengers (or journeys) were increased nearly fourteen millions, the minerals nearly nine millions of tons, the receipts more than two millions sterling, and the miles travelled nearly nine millions. The trains run in the course of last year were upwards of ten thousand a day.

Bavarian valley who did not believe in man's direct dealings with the devil.

Excepting the two officials already spoken of, the chief man of the district was Frederic of the Black Mill, commonly called the Black Miller of Sittenthal. He was a man of some understanding and considerable property, but of the worst possible reputation. A bad son, a bad husband, and a bad father, unsocial as a neighbour, hard and tyrannical as a master, he had not fulfilled one of the relations of life with credit or esteem. Cruel to his dependents and insolent to his superiors, a man so fierce and arbitrary that. none but the stoutest-hearted dare oppose him, he found himself master in a world of slaves-a master who had never known ruth or justice. His father, the old miller, had long lived in daily dread of some murderous violence from him; and even yet were to be seen the bloodstains on the oaken floor, and the deep dents on the wall, where once the Black Miller had struck the old man with an axe, and very nearly sent,

The inland roads of Great Britain, however, can never lose their importance as great feeding arteries of towns, even under any possible exten-him to the world beyond the grave ere his time sion of railways. They have been chiefly made what they are by the greatest engineers, and some of the works of Rennie and Telford of this kind need not hide their heads by the side of the famous Alpine Simplon. Leaving the railway behind us, at any point, we may find much to be proud of amongst our monuments of road-making on the hills and in the valleys of our country. What we have got, however, should not blind us to what we have not got, and while six bridges, practically closed by a toll, are spanning the river Thames between Chelsea and Southwark, we ought not to consider our road-making thoroughly finished.

THE BLACK MILL.

was come. And still remained on the massive doors the heavy bolts and bars, and locks and chains, by which the father had sought to protect himself against his son's madness and revenge. Indeed, there were not wanting wit nesses to swear that when he lay sick and failing, his son had dragged him from his bed, and flung him down the stone steps in front of the mill; saying that he had lived long enough, and what room was there in the world for such a worn-out old wretch as he? So that when he died, a few days later, the ghastly shadow of parricide and murder had flitted through the house, but none were bold enough to seize that shadow, and give it the bodily form of accusation and evidence. The stern savage went on employing all his energies and invention in torturing the victims dependent on him.

IN the highlands of Bavaria, shut out from the rest of the world by rocky crags and inac- The "house - mother," Barbara, a gentle, cessible hills, lies the dark and gloomy valley of timid, weak-minded woman, patient and saintly the Sitte, a valley which, in olden times, was enough, but without even a slave's faculty of held to be haunted by evil spirits, and doomed self-assertion or defence, was his chief victim; to all forms of sinful sorrow, but which, to and he did not spare her. He never spoke to modern understanding, would only betoken her save by the most insulting names and discase and madness, and the crimes springing epithets; he beat her daily, with or without naturally from poverty, ignorance, and isolation. provocation, and ever without intentional of The inhabitants were, for the most part, of the fence; and not only beat her, as any ill-temvery lowest class; for, save the priest and ma-pered man might have beaten an unloved wife, gistrate, not an educated man of good social but carried his violence to the very limits of condition lived in the shadow of those gloomy murder. Indeed, he would have murdered her, hills to give his better thoughts and a brighter and that more than once, had she not been deexample to the poorer and less instructed. Confended by her sons, whose love for their poor sequently, the people were rough and ignorant, down-trodden, broken-spirited mother was the sunk in superstition, narrow-minded and bigoted, most pathetic thing in all this mournful tragedy. holding to all the prejudices of a worn-out Once he struck her so brutally on her head that time, and making their very religion but the she was rendered unconscious for many weeks, cause of strife and delusion. They had aban- and indeed never quite recovered the use of her doned the more innocent and picturesque de- small brain; and once he broke her arm with a ceptions of the ancient church to adopt in their blow from the back of an axe: besides cutting stead the wildest canons of the " devil-creed," and wounding her with knives, hatchets, sharpand they mixed up the idea of sorcery and pointed stones, or anything else dangerous and magic and witchcraft with everything unaccus-handy. And not content with this more active tomed in man or ungenial in nature. There manner of ill usage, the Black Miller went were not half a dozen people in this louely into other and even more humiliating details.

He would absent himself for weeks, taking all the money with him, and locking up the family stores, so that the wife and children were nearly famished to death during his stay; a contingency that gave increased zest to his pleasures; and then he would come back empty-handed, miser as he was having spent all his money, frequently amounting to important sums, on the most abandoned women of the neighbouring towns; by some of whom-notably one woman named Hopfgärtner he had large families publicly acknowledged and sumptuously supported. To the twelve children borne him by poor Barbara he had never been friend or father. Of those twelve only five now remained alive, and more than one person said that the Black Miller had murdered the others; while some said shudderingly, having devoted himself to the Devil, he had killed them according to the terms of his bond, and to save his own soul for yet a few years longer. He made his sons his day-labourers, but gave them only blows and curses for their wages; his daughters were his house servants house servants in rags, shoeless and half-starved, beaten and ill-treated like their mother; to none of them was he even human, but more like a fierce wild beast.

went to lodge her statement with the magistrate, two months after her husband's disappearance. She said how the miller had gone, taking with him all his ready money and bank bills, leaving them nothing to cat, and no money to buy food; leaving them, in fact, in such a position that without some assistance they must have starved, for they were unable to touch his rents, or sell his stores without legal authorisation. The magistrate heard the mill-wife's story, rubbed his chin, looked at her hard, and thought; then decided to give her letters of administration, and power to act until such time as the Black Miller chose to reappear. Barbara paid the gentleman heavily, and smiled as she returned to her home. Then she and her sons entered into the peaceful occupation of the Black Mill, its lands, and revenues, waiting for the time until the miller would return.

For more than a year they led the most contented and undisturbed life possible. From a very sink of enmity, strife, and discord, the old doomed house became a comparative heaven of ease, silence, and love. As Barbara and the sons had always been respected, the people were not sorry to be able to show them many kindly attentions, and thus to prove to them that their former repugnance had been to the father only, and in nowise connected with themselves. This one brief year was the most prosperous and contented, outwardly, that the family at the Black Mill had ever known.

The family consisted of two girls and two boys, the eldest of whom, Conrad, was eightand-twenty, the youngest, Kunigunde, eighteen; a stable-lad of thirteen, who lived in the mill, but at a remote part of the house where he could hear very little; and Wagner, a day- It was the general opinion that the miller had labourer, who, with his wife, inhabited a small been carried off bodily by the devil; indeed, cottage, or lean-to, by the side. It was a lonely many of the villagers swore that they had seen God-forgotten place altogether, that old Black his tortured ghost, and heard his awful cries, Mill of Sittenthal; far removed from any other as his former flatterer and friend had now habitation, and still farther isolated by the evil become his unsparing torturer and master; reputation which it had gained both in the past but there were others, a few of trifle less and present. For common report said that it besotted cast, who looked graver than even was haunted by ghosts and evil spirits, and still this belief would have made them, and who the belated traveller, passing near, might hear spoke on the subject below their breath, and shrieks and groans and cries and the sobs of mysteriously. Soon a low heavy murmur went frightened women, and the shrill screams of young round; a terrified whisper, that grew and children borne on the dead night air in a very gathered as it grew; a horrible suspicion; an tumult of crime and despair commingled. There- awful word; for pale lips muttered MURDERfore, though the wife was known to be a good the murder of a father and a husband, wife and and pious woman, and the sons fine, industrious, children all consenting. But all agreed that honest lads, who remained in their present tor- Wagner and his witch-wife knew more of the ture only because of their mother and that they business than any one else, and that the inmight stand between her and their father's vio-quiry and suspicion would begin with them. lence, yet the prejudices of the neighbours were too strong to be overcome, and weeks would pass without a soul of honest fame daring to venture within the shadow of that gloomy and accursed place.

This Wagner, who lived in the little cottage or house beside the mill, was a discharged soldier; a man of bad parentage and worse life. His wife was no better than himself, and had, moreover, the reputation of being a dangerous On the 9th of August, 1817, the Black witch, whose very look could blight, and whose Miller suddenly disappeared. No one knew spoken charm or curse could kill; a woman so what had become of him, or whither he had foul in person and so tainted in name, that not gone; but his life was so evil and his habits so even the most disreputable would associate with lawless that no one was astonished at anything her. But they were both much patronised at he might do and what if the devil, his father, the Black Mill; almost fearfully so; for what had carried him off bodily at last? It was what but fear, and the possession of some dread the world of Sittenthal looked for, and it seemed power, could induce such women as Barbara as if they were not to be disappointed. The and her daughters to hold constant friendly inmill family kept quite quiet for some time, but tercourse with anything so vile as Anna Wagon the 11th of October poor half-witted Barbara | ner? and what but the knowledge of some awful

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secret could give that desperate villain her hus- two sons; but without effect. They anband, the discharged soldier, such influence swered just as they had answered three years over Conrad and young Frederic? Besides, ago; and the commissioner thought he was Wagner had been heard to say, jeeringly, that going to have his labour for nothing, and be if he told all he knew, the old place would made a fool of into the bargain. But the next crack asunder for very horror; and that, as for day Wagner was taken in hand, and proved the mill family, they were indeed bound to be himself the friend of justice and the new comkind to him, and liberal, for if they held back, missioner. It was not long before he smoothed he could make them give him what money he away all difficulties, and knotted the halter for would, and they might think themselves let off his own neck quite resignedly. Silently he led easily for any mere money payment he chose to the soldiers over a waste bit of ground that lay demand. All these rumours and hints coming near the mill; up to a steep ravine, where nofinally, and last of all, to the ears of the magis- thing but lizards and loathsome reptiles crept trate he who had granted the letters of ad- among the stones, and the hoarse black raven ministration-a search was decided on, and the screamed over the deep rift. police entered the mill. But Barbara and the sons knew the weakness of the official. A blind of gold soon darkened his eyes, and neither he nor his gendarmes could discover a trace of foul play on which suspicion might rest. Yet the word once spoken never wholly died away; the suspicion, once awakened, never slept again; and though the family returned to their old peaceful way of life, and for three years longer forgot their former griefs; yet the cloud was always over them, and who knew when it might burst forth into tempest and despair?

In 1821, the magistrate of the Sittenthal district fell under the displeasure of his superiors. A commission was sent down to examine and report on his conduct; during which time he was suspended, and access to the registration office denied him. While the commission was going on, a fire suddenly broke out in the registration-office, where all the deeds and papers were kept; and before it could be extinguished the chief part of the records were destroyed. Thus, a crowd of witnesses was got rid of, which would have been as awkward as undeniable. But among the papers saved was one headed " Touching the appointment of a curator for the absent Black Miller," by which it appeared evident that more lay behind than had ever been made manifest to the public. The new commissioner was curious and energetic. He soon learnt the story of the Black Miller, and all the gossip connected with his strange and sudden disappearance; he learnt, too, that the magistrate had caused the mill to be searched in the most careless and unsatisfactory manner; that his "report" had been laughed at by every one in the place, and believed by all to have been bought by a bribe. In a word, the commissioner was set full and fair on the track, and it would be his own fault if he did not follow up the scent. He resolved at once on his course of action, and the grass did not grow under his feet before he translated that resolve into deeds. That very evening, in the mournful hours of the early darkness, while Barbara and her children were standing by the table saying grace before supper, he suddenly surrounded the mill with a band of soldiers; and, before the inmates had time to speak among themselves or arrange the order of their answers, placed every one of them under separate arrest. And first were examined Barbara and her

"Here," said Wagner, "may the corpse of the Black Miller be found, for here the sons flung him after they had murdered him, piling upon him weeds and moss and heavy stones; yes, here is the Black Miller sure enough!"

The soldiers rushed down the ravine, and began to dig, Wagner directing. At last, after having removed many large and heavy boulders, they came to a heap of dead leaves and smaller stones; when the man cried out, "Now for the body!" and the next instant their picks struck upon a mass of mouldering cloth and linen with the skeleton of a human being enclosed.

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"Yes," cried Wagner, as they brought up the heap, "yes, that is the Black Miller! Four years ago, the sons, in my presence, carried him here and flung him into the hole, and then we covered him up with stones and moss. And look at his beautiful teeth! The Black Miller had grand teeth, just like the skeleton here!" As many of the bystanders remembered.

When the wife and children were brought to the place-as they were, suddenly, and without preparation-a most noticeable effect was produced on each, but different with each. "Yes," said the eldest son, Conrad, and without being questioned, "that is my father, but I am not the doer." Frederic, the second son, looked silently at the bones. When asked what they were, he answered, doggedly, "What should they be? They are bones; but whether they are the bones of a man or beast I do not know. I do not understand either men's bones nor beasts'." Kunigunde, the youngest daughter, cried out on the way, "I know nothing of it. I know certainly that that thing is my father, but of how he came yonder I know nothing. Í am guiltless, quite guiltless." Margaret, the second daughter, also said, "Indeed I am innocent. I knew nothing of the matter until my father began to scream fearfully. It was too late then. I have not had a happy hour since. Oh God! what will become of us!"

All these passionate protestations were evidence enough. The new commissioner was not to be bought off like the friendly old magistrate : blood must be redeemed by blood, and the offended majesty of justice vindicated. The wife, her four children, and Wagner, the daylabourer, were all indicted for the murder of Frederic, the Black Miller, and matters looked

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