track was a hedgeless, green band among thistles and isolated thorns, glittering dark hollies, and ash trees. Here and there the sheep rested in the shade of a little bramble and thorn thicket, where an oak or ash buried its trunk, and roses climbed. The clear, high tinkling of the bells on still wandering sheep was almost as gay as if the bells were on dancers’ feet. The turf on the track was the finest, and was bounded by a tussocky line on one side, if not both. And so it serpentined on the high, flat back of the hills, always among old, isolated thorns or small, clear-cut thickets. [Illustration: On Telegraph Hill.] But this was not the Icknield Way, which went straight over Telegraph Hill, and steeply and deeply worn, down to a green lane on the other side, where it was joined on the left by another track descending from a little tumulus with two thorns on it. The green lane winding south-westward was broad, but the spread of the beeches on its left side was broader and roofed it wholly; the turf was better when this line of trees came to an end. Suddenly a chalk pit on the left narrowed it, and this narrowness had been continued on, and used for wheat as far as the next turning. Thenceforward it widened, and had rough hedges of elder and nettles, holly and ash, between it and the undulating corn. In front bulked the smooth ridge of Galley Hill. Past the turning to Offley there were four or five tracks parallel but on different levels, with an embanked one in the centre. Soon it was again on the turf of the Downs, curving around the right base of Galley Hill, the open land on the left, hedges and fields on the right; past the hill there were two hedges and ploughed land on either hand. Hereby was the entrance into Bedfordshire. Then it came almost at right angles to the straight mound of Dray’s Ditches, but turned to the right along it, followed by the parish boundary into the Luton and Bedford road. If, instead of going alongside the ditches, I had gone straight ahead upon the line of the way, I should have struck this road at the sixteenth milestone, and at the opposite turning to Leagrave which I actually took. The boundary, on the other hand, went on over the main road towards Houghton. The road down to Leagrave was an ordinary hedged road with narrow, green edges. After passing a little copse on the left I turned on the same side, by an ash a century old, into a broad green track to Limbury. It had hedges, but that on the left strayed away round a huge rushy space. Beyond this was the clean orange wall of a sand pit, and then a green field, and then the tree-tops, and the crowd of roofs and the tall chimneys of Luton, and in the midst a tower above all the rest. But the hedge returned and the way narrowed, and it had to cross Leagrave Marsh and the tiny Lea. There was a choice of road or path. Entering the brand-new, jerry-built, slated cages of combined Limbury and Leagrave Marsh, I turned to the right along Limbury Road,