HIS book, like its companion In Search of England, is the record of a rather haphazard motor-car holiday in spring. It is a queer mixture. In the earlier book I deliberately shirked realities. I made wide and inconvenient circles to avoid modern towns and cities. I went through Lancashire without one word about Manchester and Liverpool. I devoted myself entirely to ancient towns and cathedral cities, to green fields and pretty things. This book is an attempt to give a more general view of England, town and country. You will find in it the past and the present, cathedrals and factories, town walls and rag markets-the wandering of St. Columba's dead body through Anglo-Saxon England is separated by only a few pages from an account of a golf-ball factory in Birmingham! This may displease the tourist, but the traveller may see in it an attempt to present a fair and accurate picture of Old and New England. England is an incredible jumble of romance and reality.

In the other book I dwelt mainly in the south and the west, rushing, rather wildly, through the north. In this book I linger in the north. I hope that many London motorists may be encouraged to go north instead of south gonorth and west, which, at the present moment, they do instinctively. No man who wishes to understand the country in which he lives can neglect the north of England. Almost within our time we have seen a great re-grouping in the distribution of human energy, comparable only perhaps with the switchover of our ports in medieval times from the east to the west coast. The Industrial Revolution, while it has planted an enormous population in the north, has at the same time distorted our ideas of that part of the country. We are inclined to think of the north as an extended Sheffield. The symbol of the north is the chimney-stack. It is only when we go there that we realize how very slightly the age of coal and steel has deformed the green beauty of England. Our manufacturing districts, vast as they are, form merely a vii