reach Gatesboro' by a short cut for
foot-travellers along fields and lanes. He was always glad to avoid
the high road: doubtless for such avoidance he had good reasons.
But prudential reasons were in this instance supported by vagrant
inclinations. High roads are for the prosperous. By-paths and ill-luck
go together. But by-paths have their charm, and ill-luck its pleasant
moments.

They passed then from the high road into a long succession of green
pastures, through which a straight public path conducted them into one
of those charming lanes never seen out of this bowery England,--a lane
deep sunk amidst high banks with overhanging oaks, and quivering ash,
gnarled wych-elm, vivid holly and shaggy brambles, with wild convolvulus
and creeping woodbine forcing sweet life through all. Sometimes the
banks opened abruptly, leaving patches of green sward, and peeps through
still sequestered gates, or over moss-grown pales, into the park or
paddock of some rural thane. New villas or old manor-houses on lawny
uplands, knitting, as it were, together England's feudal memories with
England's freeborn hopes,--the old land with its young people; for
England is so old, and the English are so young! And the gray cripple
and the bright-haired child often paused, and gazed upon the demesnes
and homes of owners whose lots were cast in such pleasant places. But
there was no grudging envy in their gaze; perhaps because their life was
too remote from those grand belongings. And therefore they could enjoy
and possess every banquet of the eye. For at least the beauty of what we
see is ours for the moment, on the simple condition that we do not covet
the thing which gives to our eyes that beauty. As the measureless sky
and the unnumbered stars are equally granted to king and to beggar; and
in our wildest ambition we do not sigh for a monopoly of the empyrean,
or the fee-simple of the planets: so the earth too, with all its fenced
gardens and embattled walls, all its landmarks of stern property and
churlish ownership, is ours too by right of eye. Ours to gaze on the
fair possessions with such delight as the gaze can give; grudging to the
unseen owner his other, and, it may be, more troubled rights, as little
as we grudge an astral proprietor his acres of light in Capricorn.
Benignant is the law that saith, "Thou shalt not covet."

When the sun was at the highest our wayfarers found a shadowy nook for
their rest and repast. Before them ran a s