lf, if
you follow it, dips into a valley where the horses must splash through
the water of a brook spread out some fifteen or twenty yards wide; for,
after the primitive Surrey fashion, there is no bridge for waggons. A
narrow wooden structure bears foot-passengers; you cannot but linger
half across and look down into its clear stream. Up the current where it
issues from the fields and falls over a slight obstacle the sunlight
plays and glances.

A great hawthorn bush grows on the bank; in spring, white with May; in
autumn, red with haws or peggles. To the shallow shore of the brook,
where it washes the flints and moistens the dust, the house-martins come
for mortar. A constant succession of birds arrive all day long to drink
at the clear stream, often alighting on the fragments of chalk and flint
which stand in the water, and are to them as rocks.

Another footpath leads from the road across the meadows to where the
brook is spanned by the strangest bridge, built of brick, with one arch,
but only just wide enough for a single person to walk, and with parapets
only four or five inches high. It is thrown aslant the stream, and not
straight across it, and has a long brick approach. It is not unlike--on
a small scale--the bridges seen in views of Eastern travel. Another path
leads to a hamlet, consisting of a church, a farmhouse, and three or
four cottages--a veritable hamlet in every sense of the word.

In a village a few miles distant, as you walk between cherry and pear
orchards, you pass a little shop--the sweets, and twine, and trifles are
such as may be seen in similar windows a hundred miles distant. There is
the very wooden measure for nuts, which has been used time out of mind,
in the distant country. Out again into the road as the sun sinks, and
westwards the wind lifts a cloud of dust, which is lit up and made rosy
by the rays passing through it. For such is the beauty of the sunlight
that it can impart a glory even to dust.

Once more, never go by a stile (that does not look private) without
getting over it and following the path. But they all end in one place.
After rambling across furze and heath, or through dark fir woods; after
lingering in the meadows among the buttercups, or by the copses where
the pheasants crow; after gathering June roses, or, in later days,
staining the lips with blackberries or cracking nuts, by-and-by the path
brings you in sight of a railway station. And the railway station,
thr