SEASIDE CARRIAGE DRAWN BY GOAT.
The stranger stares with amusement at the dainty goat-chaises as they drive away filled with merry loads of children. Then he travels up to London and goes for a stroll in one of the poorer districts of the great city.
It is a Bank Holiday perhaps, or a fine Saturday in the summer-time, and the costermongers are off in their donkey-carts for a day's outing on Hampstead Heath. What a noise and clatter there is as the heavily laden little vehicles trot past, the donkeys looking so smart with their well-groomed coats and bright harness, and the drivers in the festive costumes decorated with pearl buttons that, surely, no foreign city in the world can rival!
We leave Whitechapel or the Old Kent Road behind us now, and journey out into the country, where, in some narrow green lane or on a breezy common, we overtake a yellow-painted gipsy van, hung about with baskets and brooms, and drawn by a sturdy, sleepy old horse. The owner of the van walks at his horse's head, or sits comfortably on the shaft, and through a little muslin-curtained window we catch a glimpse of his wife's dark face and long earrings. The gipsy children, ragged, bright-eyed urchins, lag behind, gathering flowers from the hedges, or run through the dust of the road to beg for pennies.
Certainly England has its own share of strange vehicles, and there are others even more curious still to be seen in out-of-the-way districts. One of these is the two-wheeled cart used for farm-work in some parts of Wales, which, in shape, is almost exactly like the ancient chariots that were found in Britain by the Roman invaders when they landed between Walmer and Sandwich nearly two thousand years ago.
Across St. George's Channel the quaint-looking Irish jaunting car is to be found, and then we travel back again to the continent of Europe. If we landed at Ostend or Antwerp before the War, most likely the first thing we should have seen would be a neat little cart loaded with vegetables or bright milk-cans, and harnessed to one or two large handsome dogs.
In England most dogs, except those owned by farmers or sportsmen, lead idle lives, but this is not the case on the Continent. The dogs of Belgium, Holland, and Germany are quite content to work—and to work hard, too—for their livings. There are numbers of them in the towns and villages, bravely dragging heavy loads, or lying down between the shafts and taking a well-earned nap in some shady corner of the cobbled street.