eds in a similar fashion.
Clearly the makers of old-time guide-books must wake up, or everybody
will take to automobiling, if only to have the right to demand one of
these excellent guides. To be sure the same information might to a
very considerable extent be included in the recognized guide-books;
indeed Joanne's excellent series has in one or two instances added
something of the sort in recent editions of their "Normandie" and
"Provence," but each volume deals only with some special locality,
whereas the Guide-Michelin deals with the whole of France, and the
house also issues another covering Belgium, Holland, and the Rhine
country.

The chief concern of the touring automobilist, after the pleasures of
the road, is the choice of a hotel. The days when the diligences of
Europe drew up before an old-time inn, with the sign of a pewter
plate, an _ecu d'or_, a holly branch, or a prancing white horse, have
long since disappeared. The classic good cheer of other days, a fowl
and a bottle of Beaune, a baron of beef and porter, or a carp and
good Rhine wine have gone, too. The automobile traveller requires, if
not a stronger fare, at least a more varied menu, as he does a more
ample supply of water for washing.

These quaint old inns of other days, with fine mullioned windows,
galleried courtyards, and vine-trellised facades, still exist here
and there, but they have been much modernized, else they would not
exist at all. There is not much romance in the make-up of the modern
traveller, at least so far as his own comfort is concerned, and the
tired automobilist who has covered two hundred kilometres of road,
between lunch and dinner, requires something more heroic in the way
of a bath than can be had in a tiny porcelain basin, and a more
comfortable place to sit in than the average bar-parlour, such as he
finds in most country inns in England.

As Sterne said: "They do things better in France," and the
accommodation supplied the automobilist is there far ahead of what
one gets elsewhere.

The hotel demanded by the twentieth-century traveller need not
necessarily be a palace, but it must be something which caters to the
advancing needs of the time in a more efficient manner than the
country inn of the eighteenth century, when the only one who
travelled in comfort was he who thrust himself upon the hospitality
of friends.

We are living in a hygienic age, and to-day we are particular about
things that did not in the le