We left this highway at Chelmsford to visit the Greenstead Church near Chipping-Ongar, about twenty-two miles from London.  This is one of the most curious churches in all England.  It is a diminutive building, half hidden amidst the profusion of foliage, and would hardly attract attention unless one had learned of its unique construction and remarkable history.  It is said to be the only church in England which is built with wooden walls, these being made from the trunks of large oak trees split down the center and roughly sharpened at each end.  They are raised from the ground by a low brick foundation, and inside the spaces between the trunks are covered with pieces of wood.  The rough timber frame of the roof is fastened with wooden pins.  The interior of the building is quite dark, there being no windows in the wooden walls, and the light comes in from a dormer window in the roof.  This church was built in the year 1010 to mark the resting place of St. Edmund the Martyr, whose remains were being carried from Bury to London.  The town of Ongar, near by, once had an extensive castle, of which little remains, and in the chancel of the church is the grave of Oliver Cromwell’s favorite daughter.  A house in High Street was for some time the residence of David Livingstone, the great African explorer.

From Chipping-Ongar we followed for the third time the delightful road leading to London, passing through the village of Chigwell, of which I have spoken at length elsewhere.  On coming into London, we found the streets in a condition of chaos, owing to repairs in the pavement.  The direct road was quite impassable and we were compelled to get into the city through by-streets—­not an easy task.  In London the streets do not run parallel as in many of our American cities.  No end of inquiry was necessary to get over the ten miles after we were in the city before we reached our hotel.  It was not very convenient to make inquiries, either, when driving in streets crowded to the limit where our car could not halt for an instant without stopping the entire procession.  We would often get into a pocket behind a slow-moving truck or street car and be compelled to crawl along for several blocks at the slowest speed.

It was just sunset when we stopped in front of the Hotel Russell.  We had been absent on our tour six weeks to a day and our odometer registered exactly 3070 miles.  As there were five or six days of the time that we did not travel, we had averaged about six hundred miles a week during the tour.  The weather had been unusually fine for England; we had perhaps half a dozen rainy days, but only once did it rain heavily.  We had now traveled a total of 4100 miles and had visited the main points of interest in the Kingdom excepting those in the country south of the city, where we planned a short tour before sailing.  We remained in London a week before starting on this trip, but during that time I did not take the car out of the garage.  I had come to the conclusion that outside of Sundays and holidays the nervous strain of attempting to drive an automobile in the streets of London was such as to make the effort not worth while.