Chapter 12 - Page 2

them. At intervals, trees of vast trunk and mighty spread
of foliage, whether elms or oaks, grew in the line of the hedge, and
the bark of those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was not gray and naked,
like the trees which the traveller had been accustomed to see, but
verdant with moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a network of
creeping plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering upward,
and making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the
supporting tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf,
which the traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a
certain reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and
of the pasty in which it was rooted from of old.

The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the
feet that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older
than the oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between
which it passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller
had crossed that morning; old as the times when people first debarred
themselves from wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant impulse
led them. The footpath, therefore, still retains some of the
characteristics of a woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of
nature not pressed for time nor restrained by artificial barriers; it
sweeps and lingers along, and finds pretty little dells and nooks of
delightful scenery, and picturesque glimpses of halls or cottages, in
the same neighborhood where a highroad would disclose only a tiresome
blank. They run into one another for miles and miles together, and
traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as a matter of favor,
but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a kind of property
and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest. The highroad
sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart of the
country.

A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields;
no frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities
by the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the
climbing foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her
milk-pail, the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been
lover meetings, cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a
thousand pretty scenes of rustic manners.

It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one
of the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout,
like