How the World Travels

								

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.


In Belgium dogs were employed, not only for peaceful purposes, but
in times of war for drawing ambulances, little ammunition wagons,
and machine-guns.


Oxen are also used to draw carts in most of the European countries,
and very picturesque some of them are. In Turkey most elaborate
bullock carts are used in some districts as mourning carriages,
and in them women are conveyed when they wish to visit the
grave-yards. These carts are usually drawn by two animals which
wear, fixed to their collars, large curved pieces of wood hung
with tassels. The carts themselves are elaborately decorated, and
while one man leads the bullocks another, staff in hand, walks at
the side of the vehicle.


There are many other strange conveyances to be seen in Turkey,
perhaps the most curious of all being the sedan chairs which,
although they have quite disappeared from other cities of Europe,
are still used at night or on snowy days in the streets of
Constantinople. In the eighteenth century sedan chairs were common
in England, and in them the powdered and patched ladies went to
their balls and routs, but it is strange to think of the quaint
old-world conveyances being carried by stalwart Turkish porters
along the dark, muddy streets of an Oriental city. These chairs,
like the agricultural carts of Wales, come down to us from a past
age, and another strange survival is seen at Schiessel, a village
near Bremen, where the peasant girls drive to weddings and other
festivities in large wagons that, painted and decorated with
garlands of flowers, are exactly like the old carts and charettes
of the Middle Ages.
Russia is a country where the carriages appear very strange to
English eyes, for there three horses are driven abreast, and while
the two outer animals gallop, the one in the centre is trained to