of tall trees and again unexpectedly dropped into some quiet village nestling in the Dorset hills.  One of the quaintest of these, not even mentioned in Baedeker, is Cerne Abbas, a straggling village through which the road twisted along—­a little old-world community, seemingly severed from modern conditions by centuries.  It rather lacked the cozy picturesqueness of many English villages.  It seemed to us that it wanted much of the bloom and shrubbery.  Everywhere were the gray stone houses with thatched roofs, sagging walls and odd little windows with square or diamond-shaped panes set in iron casements.  Nowhere was there a structure that had the slightest taint of newness.  The place is quite unique.  I do not recall another village that impressed us in just the same way.  Our car seemed strangely out of place as it cautiously followed the crooked main street of the town, and the attention bestowed on it by the smaller natives indicated that a motor was not a common sight in Cerne Abbas.  Indeed, we should have missed it ourselves had we not wandered from the main road into a narrow lane that led to the village.  While we much enjoyed our day in the Dorset byways, our progress had necessarily been slow.

In Yeovil, we found an old English town apparently without any important history, but a prosperous center for a rich farming country.  The place is neat and clean and has a beautifully kept public park—­a feature of which the average English town appears more appreciative than the small American city.

From Yeovil to Torquay, through Exeter, with a stop at the latter place, was an unusually good day’s run.  The road was more hilly than any we had passed over heretofore, not a few of the grades being styled “dangerous,” and we had been warned by an English friend that we should find difficult roads and steep hills in Devon and Cornwall.  However, to one who had driven over some of our worst American roads, even the “bad” roads of England looked good, and the “dangerous” hills, with their smooth surface and generally uniform grade, were easy for our moderate-powered motor.

Exeter enjoys the distinction of having continuously been the site of a town or city for a longer period than is recorded of any other place in England.  During the Roman occupation it was known as a city, and it is believed that the streets, which are more regular than usual and which generally cross each other at right angles, were first laid out by the Romans.  It is an important town of about fifty thousand inhabitants, with thriving trade and manufactures, and modern improvements are in evidence everywhere.