had spent the greater part of their lives there. I
remember the first time I saw Rosalind I saw the light of the Arden sky
in her eyes, the buoyancy of the Arden air in her step, the purity and
freedom of the Arden life in her nature. We built our home within
sight of the Forest, and there was never a day that we did not talk
about and plan our long-delayed journey thither.

"After all," said Rosalind, on that first glorious morning in Arden,
"as I look back I see that we were always on the way here."

III

Well, this is the Forest of Arden.

The first sensation that comes to one who finds himself at last within
the boundaries of the Forest of Arden is a delicious sense of freedom.
I am not sure that there is not a certain sympathy with outlawry in
that first exhilarating consciousness of having gotten out of the
conventional world--the world whose chief purpose is that all men shall
wear the same coat, eat the same dinner, repeat the same polite
commonplaces, and be forgotten at last under the same epitaph. Forests
have been the natural refuge of outlaws from the earliest time, and
among the most respectable persons there has always been an
ill-concealed liking for Robin Hood and the whole fraternity of the men
of the bow. Truth is above all things characteristic of the dwellers
in Arden, and it must be frankly confessed at the beginning, therefore,
that the Forest is given over entirely to outlaws; those who have
committed some grave offence against the world of conventions, or who
have voluntarily gone into exile out of sheer liking for a freer life.
These persons are not vulgar law-breakers; they have neither blood on
their hands nor ill-gotten gains in their pockets; they are, on the
contrary, people of uncommonly honest bearing and frank speech. Their
offences evidently impose small burden on their conscience, and they
have the air of those who have never known what it is to have the
Furies on one's track. Rosalind was struck with the charming
naturalness and gaiety of every one we met in our first ramble on that
delicious and never-to-be-forgotten morning when we arrived in Arden.
There was neither assumption nor diffidence; there was rather an entire
absence of any kind of self-consciousness. Rosalind had fancied that
we might be quite alone for a time, and we had expected to have a few
days to ourselves. We had even planned in our romantic moments--and
there is always a good deal of romance