Rooted at Sherborne, say, one of these great arboriferous road-systems wends north by east, towards camps of the present and earthworks of the past. At a widening of bole it forks, pushing one arm out easterly and another south-westerly; such is the swayed posture here that you glimpse the dryad in it, as you do the Venus de Milo in some real tree-trunk that ivy swathes to the hip. The eastward limb, if you cleave to that, will become stem itself, and sway out curved arms of its own to woo you; take one of those rustling prongs for a mile or two and it bifurcates, so that soon, like the squirrel, you must choose your branch. From bough to bough you may leap (so to speak) by agile footpaths, but if you keep on along a lean lane that presently thins into a mere rut, you attain to the extremest twig. It is thus that afoot from Sherborne you reach to Sandford Orcas, say, or if your wayfaring tree be rooted at Yeovil, to that extremity of path a foredraught (to use the old Worcestershire name for an approach to a farm), which brings you to Barrington Court. And all along your way there will have been bivouacs of blossoms, fruit, seed for the next blooming; or in every footprint of Primavera you may have seen the primrose lichening the banks, some morning still covered with dew. Pray do not remark that the primroses are primulaceous—it is the occulter analogies a true loiterer likes to ramble into—nor declare that lichens are parasites which stifle their billets: maybe, maybe. But they are gentle intruders anyhow, no Prussians in Belgium, and the householder lives long, on excellent terms with his guest. Lichens are dowerings; indeed, our own wrinkles might be glad of them—they prank and enrich; even the sad coloured ones do, and the black. ‘These weeds are memories,’ Lear said, and fair lichen of remembrance, musing emotions of pity or relish, and dew of tears, even, may alight upon a rambler as he goes his discursive, his essayist’s way. Though he latterly gad at a slackening pace, and the extreme twig bring him, chief mourner for himself, at the head of a dark procession, to some short, shallow trench and clay cot, I think he will have been the happier and the longer-lived for his lichening; he may also have become wealthy meanwhile, in _memorabilia_, the thiefless hoard that never lessens; he may even have been hallowed somewhat, not left untouched at heart as the true ungodly, they whom neither the beauty of this world nor the dream of another can impassion, or the ‘sense of tears in mortal things’ soften inside. With a venial, reverent Pharisaism, therefore, that in truth is but gratitude, a rambler may thank his wandering stars that _he_ has been no man unlichenable, upon whom no charm of place, or quip of illusion, nor the _lacrymae rerum_ gat hold.