has.

Lancaster was perhaps not the best place we could have chosen for the
night, but everything had been running well and we had pushed on
simply for the joy of the running. The County Hotel at Lancaster was
like other county hotels in England. _Verb. sap._ They had the
audacity to charge two shillings for housing our automobile for the
night, and pointed out the fact that this was the special rate given
members of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland.

Well! It was the most awful "roast" we found in England! They must
have some grudge against the Club! "B. B. B." cost seven shillings
and sixpence, and dinner four shillings more, a bottle of Bordeaux
five shillings, etc. Four of us for the night (including a hot bath
for each--which cost the hotel practically nothing) paid something
like L3 for our _accommodation_. It wasn't worth it!

We passed the "Lake District" to the left the next morning, where it
always rains, we are told. Perhaps it always does rain in some parts
of Westmoreland, but it was bright and sunny when we crossed Shap
Fell, at a height of something like twelve hundred feet above
sea-level. The railway station of Shap Summit is itself at an
elevation of a thousand feet. We had crossed nothing like this
previously in England, although it is not so very high after all, nor
is it so very terrifying in the ascent or descent. The Castle of
Comfort Inn in the Mendip Hills was only seven hundred feet, but here
we were five hundred feet above it, and the neighbouring Fells,
Helvellyn and Scafell in particular, raised their regular, rounded
peaks to something over thirty-two hundred feet in the air.

Carlisle is commonly called the border town between England and
Scotland; at any rate it was a vantage-ground in days gone by that
was of a great value to one faction and a thorn in the side to the
other. The conquering and unconquered Scots are the back-bone of
Britain, there's no denying that; and Carlisle is near enough to the
border to be intimately acquainted with their virtues.

We inspected Carlisle's cathedral, its ugly castle, and the County
Hotel,--and preferred the two former. One thing in Carlisle struck us
as more remarkable than all else, and that was that the mean annual
temperature was stated to be 48 deg. F. It was just that, when we were
there, though cloudy and unpromising as to weather. In our opinion
Carlisle is an unlovely, disagreeable place.

Gretna Green, with its famo