s we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other
counties--Warwickshire, for example--doubtless have lanes no less
lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision;
and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he
goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English
pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray.

And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be
disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not
caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect
to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made
for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you
are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching
swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for
the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy
snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses
or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and
space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose
only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way
means more than the goal.

I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most
characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been
man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the
woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey,
when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs,
it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has
tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the
dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise
and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very
heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us
somewhere in the turnings of an English lane.

Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I
should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I
should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten
years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties
are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and
distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail
to revisit England, the spring before last, it w