bossed nose; while the hoofs were like polished red pebbles, and even
the shapely horns were tinged with that colour. Walking straight up to
the old man, she began deliberately licking one of his ears with her big
rough tongue, and in doing so knocked off his old rakish cap. Picking
it up he laughed like a child, and remarked, "She knows me, this one
does--and she loikes me."

Chapter Seventeen: An Old Road Leading Nowhere

So many and minute were the directions I received about the way from
the blessed cowkeeper, and so little attention did I give them, my mind
being occupied with other things, that they were quickly forgotten.
Of half a hundred things I remembered only that I had to "bear to the
left." This I did, although it seemed useless, seeing that my way was
by lanes, across fields, and through plantations. At length I came to
a road, and as it happened to be on my left hand I followed it. It was
narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper, rougher, and
more untrodden as I progressed, until it was like the dry bed of a
mountain torrent, and I walked on boulder-stones between steep banks
about fourteen feet high. Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass
and rank moss; their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing
branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like shoots of
bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I seemed to be walking in
a dimly lighted tunnel. At length, thinking that I had kept long enough
to a road which had perhaps not been used for a century, also tired
of the monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the
right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a low, broad,
flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through the undergrowth into the
open I found myself on the level plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown
with heather and scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch
trees. Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent of
country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken, but there
was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the recent rain had
intensified. There is too much green, to my thinking, with too much
uniformity in its soft, bright tone, in South Devon. After gazing on
such a landscape the brown, harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop
seemed all the more grateful. The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I
rambled about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat down to
let