She visited several lonely places and remote cottages, where she had never been before; and began to feel a new interest given to existence when she was privileged to assist others under the pressure of that want and misery which she understood but too well. One evening she and the nurse had strayed in a new direction, and did not exactly know where they were. Very far from the house she was aware it could not be, by the time she had been absent, but they had got into one of those deep, hollow lanes, from which it is impossible to catch a glimpse of the surrounding country: those lanes so still, and so beautiful, with their broken sandy banks, covered with tufts of feathering grass, with peeping primroses and violets, and barren strawberries between; the beech and ash of the copses casting their slender branches across, and checkering the way with innumerable broken lights! While, may be, as was here the case, a long pebbly stream runs sparkling and shining upon one side of the way, forming ten thousand little pools and waterfalls as it courses along. Charmed with the scene, Lettice could not prevail upon herself to turn back till she had pursued her way a little farther. At last a turn in the lane brought her to a lowly and lonely cottage, which stood in a place where the bank had a little receded, and the ground formed a small grassy semicircle, with the steep banks rising all around it--here stood the cottage. It was an ancient, picturesque looking thing, built one knows not when. I have seen one such near Stony Cross in Hampshire, which the tradition of the county affirms to be the very identical cottage into which the dying William Rufus was carried, and I am half inclined to believe it. Their deep heavy roofs, huge roof-trees, little low walls and small windows, speak of habits of life very remote from our own--and look to me as if like a heap of earth--a tumulus--such edifices might stand unchanged for tens of ages.