As for the christening of Foxlydiate, the road-tree sways gracefully down just there, and was not _hlidh_ Early English for ‘slope’? There are other lyds and lydiates. ‘Foxlydiate’ may have meant the meet of the hunters—there are kennels near it still; but I think the name was anciently ‘Folks-lydiate,’ the hill of the ‘good folk’ or fays, and it is a superstitious little village yet. No stretch of country road used to live without its myth or chimera (of subtle contour often), its fable, its dreaming escape from the actual; a myriad perennial annals, vouched for by the affidavits of the aged, some of them puerile but some grim, lichen our by-ways; there is hardly a great house but when you pass the park-palings of split oak something romantical will come to mind, or be told in your ear. Beginning gay-coloured, as lichens often do, these sometimes darken; thus the legend at Foxlydiate is sombre and nocturnal now. The road there hears an equipage sometimes, after sunset, and this was once a fairy vehicle, I’ll warrant, perhaps a Cinderella’s coach; but it has become a nightmare now—the terror of ‘the Flying Hearse.’ Elms in platoons and companies shadow the road there, and there the bat of superstition flits through the twilight of the spirit; be there in the mood, and you may think you hear wheels rush uphill; smack of whip, snort of nag, clink of swingle-bar are heard, but no correspondent forms are visible; and that is salutary, the tradition says, for whoso _sees_ the Flying Hearse must die within the year. Many a time there I as a lad, driving home in the twilight, listened with the delight of half-sceptical terror, but I doubt if people harken for that fatal omnibus now. Tilth and foison of ghost story, aged jest, and fine old tradition no longer flourish; for towns and townsmen, spreading into the country—lichen of a sort—bring the long age of romantic rural faiths to an end. Townsmen in Arcady are rarer of late, however. War-time depopulates the country roads. The motor-car (itself a flying hearse sometimes) is scarce there now. Solitary the rambler jogs along, alone with himself, except for the flight of the mated thrush or other father bird on service of commissariat; but in what ease of silence you may now pursue your errantry, and into what delight of the unexpected! There are folk who think they ramble, yet go nose in map, by rule and rote of road; but as well employ a guide and an alpenstock—to ramble is not to ken whither, and yet to home. There are plausible short-cuts that deceive you, I know, and branches of road-trees bring you to sudden corners, hedged-in dichotomies, curves and exfoliations that the Development Commissioners, most leisurely of Government Trustees, had not even so much as begun to think of improving away, some day, before the War. These may perplex you, or even be perilous with storming petrels; but there are natural dug-outs, trenches with high green banks.