Too bold we grow, too fast we go; Too many things we want to know, Too many sights to see; 'Tis not enough o'er earth to fly; Man strives to scale the very sky On L.S. piled on D. But let the humble pedestrian take heart when overshadowed by the proud passage of Sir Gorgius Midas. His car prevails on the highways, but on the byways it is helpless, all the more if the weight of its armour be five thousand shekels of brass. And Surrey abounds in byways, some still twisting through the outer streets of London, their original character to be guessed only by such titles as _Coldharbour Lane_, _Cut-throat Lane_, which perhaps was "Cut-through Lane" in its blossoming days, and the _Worple Roads_ and _Worple Ways_ of Richmond, Wimbledon, and Mortlake, whose villa-dwellers may be ignorant that these names denote old bridle-paths. Country-folk or towns-folk, we are not always fully aware of our own blessings. Let not familiarity breed contempt for what strikes a stranger as one of the pleasantest traits in an English landscape. Nathaniel Hawthorne is not the only American who, in visiting _Our Old Home_, has taken admiring note how:-- The high-roads are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often afford him the hospitality of a wayside bench beneath a comfortable shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the footpaths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the natural flow of intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever since. An American farmer would plough across any such path and obliterate it with his drills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably springs up in this soil along the well-defined footpaths of centuries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as weeds.