mpses of shining green sea caught for a moment through
opening headlands, then lost again; more woods and solitude; and by and
by another turn lays bare, without warning, the full sweep of the
inland ocean, enriched with its bars of soft color and graced with its
wandering sails.

Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in
it half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be: it is
bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady
and pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the
prettiest and peacefulest and most homelike of homes, and through
stretches of forest that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are
alive with the music of birds; it curves always, which is a continual
promise, whereas straight roads reveal everything at a glance and kill
interest. Your road is all this, and yet you will not stay in it half a
mile, for the reason that little seductive, mysterious roads are always
branching out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also
and hide what is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your
own chosen road and explore them. You are usually paid for your trouble;
consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most
crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a body can
imagine. There is enough of variety. Sometimes you are in the level
open, with marshes thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high
on the one hand, and potato and onion orchards on the other; next, you
are on a hilltop, with the ocean and the islands spread around you;
presently the road winds through a deep cut, shut in by perpendicular
walls thirty or forty feet high, marked with the oddest and abruptest
stratum lines, suggestive of sudden and eccentric old upheavals, and
garnished with here and there a clinging adventurous flower, and here
and there a dangling vine; and by and by your way is along the sea edge,
and you may look down a fathom or two through the transparent water and
watch the diamond-like flash and play of the light upon the rocks and
sands on the bottom until you are tired of it--if you are so constituted
as to be able to get tired of it.

You may march the country roads in maiden meditation, fancy free, by
field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate,
with breath-taking surprise of ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is
a Christian land and a civilized