Often from such elbows as these a lane goes trooping off, like a truant from school. Dusky ways you come to, and bright ones, russet or green tunnels over-arched that make noontide a twilight, or jolly and titupping lanes that caper away from corner alehouses with merry, drunken staggers. Or you pass between roofless colonnades, stately cloisters with tree-trunks for mullions; these are lanes that once were avenues, leading long ago to the gates and curtilage of some manor-house now razed. It is by ways such as these that you pass the minuter Auburns, deserted cottages which by the something maniac there is now about their thatch make you think of Barnaby Rudge. And sometimes the raven croaks above those ruined little atriums; oftener the curlew calls across lesser lanes still, that were ancient pack-horse tracks, or were foot-worn in the lang syne of some local trade now dead—the Salt-way, the Rush-way, or the Keg-way leading up from some cove of contraband. The ring-dove coos to narrower paths still—O Lubin and Chloe!—the recognised sweethearting footways where every generation has loitered and whispered with the erratic ache of love. These divers cuts and tacks shorten apparent distance and cheat the tiring foot, for the way itself seems to wander with you, and each new corner to beckon you on. And this is a portion of that English form of great art which lets things develop as if they were vegetal, into a perfect beauty of anarchy, various and infinite; no Ordnance surveyor nor planner of garden cities would invent such foot-beguiling roads as these. Some of them can astound even the most experienced rambler, he almost can hear them chuckle at his surprise when he rounds into a new vista, and some of them seem to go about with the zeal of an antiquary, discovering and reconnecting the tracks of some Titan who trapesed through the quag there, before it had hardened after Noah’s flood. There are leafy labyrinths, too, mazy suburbs, _faubourgs_ of silent green cities, peopled by plants and shapes of leaves and scents so various, that in June, the schoolboy month, a man may rest there bewitched, ‘Tarrying and talked to by tongues aromatic,’ thinking himself a bodily translation, resolved into a forested world.