I suppose the skin-clad explorer of spaces we now name counties found no paths but the spoor of what a Boy Scout called ‘growly beasts.’ Between dens and water-breaks these tracks would go, and I never came to a ford without seeming to see some skin-clad explorer there before me, his tongue lapping water and his furtive eyes swivelling left and right for danger, since it was then always war-time for a man. In September, when great fleets of swallows gather in ports of departure, I have noticed them, myriad and midge-like in the air above and around—I cannot guess why—a ford. Water brings back some of the old feeling of mystery and danger into any journey, you spy the peril under the beauty as you come to a ferry, or to a string of white posts and chains that fence off a roadside burn. How Shakespeare delighted in fords! He played with the word’s meaning again and again. Many a Warwickshire place he knew where ‘the shore was shelvy and shallow,’ and he—perhaps he most of all as most human of all—would be glad to get home to his shire. There was, and I hope is yet, a ford at the ‘beggarly Broome’ which he knew of, where the road pushed into the Avon abruptly, turned at a right angle midstream, splashed axle-deep thirty yards, and emerged uphill. And this used to be a place of delicious risk for a young palmer whose staff was a whip; for at any moment the gig might become a cockleshell, floating. It was a sacred water of danger to me; may Development Commissioners destroy it never, and least of all with some iron bridge, kept painted against the mollifying lichen of rust. Splash went the fetlocks; or if you were afoot, under the lee of an old mill a lichened old boat swayed hooked, and across the echoing flow your cry went, ‘Ferry-oh!’ or ‘O-ver, miller!’—the very music of life. A ferry-boat is but a moving span, stepping-stones are a kind of ford, and bridges developed out of these, I think, for what were the piers at first but stepping-stones for a giant’s stride? Bridges—but pages and pages would not tell the rambler’s delight in those circumflex accents, those brooding brows bent over grey eyes of water wherein reflections lie deep, like thoughts that dream. Such, Jean-Paul might have cried, in one of the conceits with which he rejoiced a dead old Germany, are the flowers and honey of a road-tree, with cottages like strawy hives, under linden-tresses murmurous of clustered delight; these be the joys that wing the rambler, so that away he goes bumbling tirelessly, as I do here, to the next blossoms, and the next. Life itself climbs and descends a road-tree, I suppose—the tree of Ygdrasil; but there can be continual breaking forth into new boughs of living if one carries Spring on into Autumn, keeping pretty young in spite of the impertinences of time. Has there not been grafting of road-trees, budding of fertile young stems into lichened old branches of ways?