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قراءة كتاب The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance
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THE ROYAL MAIL
CHAPTER I.
OLD ROADS.
The present generation, who are accustomed to see the streets of our cities paved with wood or stone, or otherwise so laid out as to provide a hard and even surface suited to the locomotion of wheeled vehicles, or who by business or pleasure have been led to journey over the principal highways intersecting the kingdom in every direction, can form no idea of the state of the roads in this country during the earlier years of the Post-office—or even in times comparatively recent—unless their reading has led them to the perusal of accounts written by travellers of the periods we now refer to. The highways of the present day, radiating from London and the other large centres of industry, and extending their arms to every corner of the land, are wellnigh perfect in their kind, and present a picture of careful and efficient maintenance. Whether we look, for example, at the great north road leading from London, the Carlisle to Glasgow road, or the Highland road passing through Dunkeld, we find the roads have certain features in common: a broad hard roadway for vehicles; a neatly kept footpath where required; limits strictly defined by trim hedges, stone walls, or palings; and means provided for carrying off surface-water. The picture will, of course, vary as the traveller proceeds, flat country alternating with undulating country, and wood or moorland with cultivated fields; but the chief characteristics remain the same, constituting the roads as worthy of the age we live in.
How the people managed to get from place to place before the Post-office had a history, or indeed for long after the birth of that institution, it is hard to conceive. Then, the roads were little better than tracks worn out of the surface of the virgin land,—proceeding in some cases in a manner approaching to a right line, over hills, down valleys, through forests, and the like; in others following the natural features of the country, but giving evidence that they had never been systematically made, being rather the outcome of a mere habit of travel, just as sheep-tracks are produced on a mountain-side. Such roads in winter weather, or in rainy seasons, became terrible to the traveller: yet the only repairs that were vouchsafed consisted in filling up some of the larger holes with rude stones; and when this method of keeping up repairs no longer availed, another track was formed by bringing under foot a fresh strip of the adjoining land (generally unenclosed), and thus creating a wholly new road in place of the old one. Smiles, in his 'Lives of the Engineers,' thus describes certain of the English roads: "In some of the older settled districts of England, the old roads are still to be traced in the hollow ways or lanes, which are met with, in some places, eight and ten feet deep. Horse-tracks in summer and rivulets in winter, the earth became gradually worn into these deep furrows, many of which in Wilts, Somerset, and Devon, represent the tracks of roads as old as, if not older than, the Conquest." And again: "Similar roads existed until recently in the immediate neighbourhood of Birmingham, long the centre of considerable traffic. The sandy soil was sawn through, as it were, by generation after generation of human feet, and by pack-horses, helped by the rains, until in some places the tracks were as much as from twelve to fourteen yards deep." In the year 1690, Chancellor Cowper, who was then a barrister on circuit, thus wrote to his wife: "The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I vow 'tis melancholy consideration that