my eyes in a new
light, as if I had on the magic spectacles in the fairy tale, and just
like the man in the fairy tale, I went on and on in the new light. I
remember going through wild land on a high place; there were pools of
water shining in the sun, and great white houses in the middle of dark,
rocking pines, and then on the turn of the height I came to a little
lane that went aside from the main road, a lane that led to a wood, and
in the lane was a little old shadowed house, with a bell turret in the
roof, and a porch of trellis-work all dim and faded into the colour of
the sea; and in the garden there were growing tall, white lilies, just
as we saw them that day we went to look at the old pictures; they were
shining like silver, and they filled the air with their sweet scent. It
was from near that house I saw the valley and high places far away in
the sun. So, as I say, I went "on and on," by woods and fields, till I
came to a little town on the top of a hill, a town full of old houses
bowing to the ground beneath their years, and the morning was so still
that the blue smoke rose up straight into the sky from all the
roof-tops, so still that I heard far down in the valley the song of a
boy who was singing an old song through the streets as he went to
school, and as I passed through the awakening town, beneath the old,
grave houses, the church bells began to ring.

'It was soon after I had left this town behind me that I found the
Strange Road. I saw it branching off from the dusty high road, and it
looked so green that I turned aside into it, and soon I felt as if I had
really come into a new country. I don't know whether it was one of the
roads the old Romans made that my father used to tell me about; but it
was covered with deep, soft turf, and the great tall hedges on each side
looked as if they had not been touched for a hundred years; they had
grown so broad and high and wild that they met overhead, and I could
only get glimpses here and there of the country through which I was
passing, as one passes in a dream. The Strange Road led me on and on,
up and down hill; sometimes the rose bushes had grown so thick that I
could scarcely make my way between them, and sometimes the road
broadened out into a green, and in one valley a brook, spanned by an old
wooden bridge, ran across it. I was tired, and I found a soft and shady
place beneath an ash tree, where I must have slept for many hours, for
when I woke up it