among the dwellers in Arden--a
continuation of our wedding journey during the first week.

"It will be so much more delightful than before," suggested Rosalind,
"because nobody will stare at us, and we shall have the whole world to
ourselves." In that last phrase I recognised the ideal wedding
journey, and was not at all dismayed at the prospect of having no
society but Rosalind's for a time. But all such anticipations were
dispelled in an hour. It was not that we met many people--it is one of
the delights of the Forest that one finds society enough to take away
the sense of isolation, but not enough to destroy the sweetness of
solitude; it was rather that the few we met made us feel at once that
we had equal claim with themselves on the hospitality of the place.
The Forest was not only free to every comer, but it evidently gave
peculiar pleasure to those who were living in it to convey a sense of
ownership to those who were arriving for the first time. Rosalind
declared that she felt as much at home as if she had been born there;
and she added that she was glad she had brought only the dress she
wore. I was a little puzzled by the last remark; it seemed not
entirely logical. But I saw presently that she was expressing the
fellowship of the place which forbade that one should possess anything
that was not in use, and that, therefore, was not adding constantly to
the common stock of pleasure. Concerning the feeling of having been
born in Arden, I became convinced later that there was good reason for
believing that everybody who loved the place had been born there, and
that this fact explained the home feeling which came to one the instant
he set foot within the Forest. It is, in fact, the only place I have
known which seemed to belong to me and to everybody else at the same
time; in which I felt no alien influence. In our own home I had
something of the same feeling, but when I looked from a window or set
foot from a door I was instantly oppressed with a sense of foreign
ownership. In the great world how little could I call my own! Only a
few feet of soil out of the measureless landscape; only a few trees and
flowers out of all that boundless foliage! I seemed driven out of the
heritage to which I was born; cheated out of my birthright in the
beauty of the field and the mystery of the Forest; put off with the
beggarly portion of a younger son when I ought to have fallen heir to
the kingdom. My chief joy was