But road-trees are deciduous, too, boughs and twigs of them withering for lack of the sap of daily use; with some sense of pathos a rambler obtrudes upon the hush of lanes long left unmetalled, where the latest wheel-marks are wan. He thus comes into places of pastoral indolence that once hummed with cultivation, where not even yet, in war-time, have farmers wakened their Sleepy Hollows up. Some of the elderliest by-roads are the loneliest, and seem to lie musing of their past; even a summer breeze can blow bleakly there, and in the lulls of it the silence waits, forlorn. There are very aged, lonesome ways which seem to shiver, Lear-like, and then the rambler thinks how all the hurriers and loiterers upon them in the past lie low. We too are in the tradition: ‘This great world itself shall so wear out to naught.’ Lear wandered the Roman roads of Britain; they set one thinking of strategic railways just now. In essence an old Latin militant broadway and a German route to the extravasation of blood are the same, I suppose. Both were pushed out like spears of offence, immense and excessive, and neither was a pleasant causeway for neighbourliness. Therefore a curse shall come upon the Prussian strategic paths, such as fell upon the Roman thoroughfares here long ago. Even yet these seem to march in arms among us, between the remains of sullen native forests—they are aliens still; listen along one of them yet, and you shall think you hear the clink of greaves or the centurion’s harsh command. These ancient roads can never be homely, they have never been naturalised, the little townships hold apart from them yet. Follow Watling Street or the Fosse Way in rustic regions and you come upon few villages: our old horror of the Latin power seems to persist. British and Early-English field-folk huddled together in hamlets that developed like social islands, at the centre of cultivable common lands, connubial, away from forests of _ferae_ and thoroughfares of war. Even in York and Lancaster days villagers would use the great old roads as seldom as might be—they were marches for soldiery, stretches of savagery that husbandman and maid had better avoid. They thus became bristling frontiers, limits of peaceable excursion, confines of wapentakes or counties; in days when people were ‘Parish-bound with hedgerows as with bars,’ it would be risky to quit your township, and almost armed invasion to cross the great road. We English no more became Latin then than Teutonic later; always we have gone our own ways. Between Newark and Nottingham the Fosse marches straight, a noble Roman superb and haughty, but the other road, the true Englishman, wends devious and unsystematic: it developed as the British Empire did, out of paths and lanes of trade and gossip: they never set out to be a main road or an empire at all.