And the road glides away merrily under these straying footsteps; now hastening, now loitering, as the momentary mood suggests. Old hawthorns, doddered and crabbed, stand here and there forlorn upon the edges of the way; and where the hedge is younger and less broken, there are warm banks of turf, and clear bits of gleaming water, which it would be an insult to call ditches, looking up through tangled grass, and a wilderness of delicate stem and leaf, half weeds, half flowers. But now we have a stile to cross, mounting up from the high-road; and now it is a sunny hillside path, narrow and hemmed in between a low stone-wall, from which all manner of mosses and tufts of waving herbage have taken away the rudeness, and a field of young green corn: innocent enough just now are these soft plants low upon the fragrant soil in the blade; but you shall see how the bearded spikes will push you to the wall, and the red poppies mock you, lying safe under shelter of the tall corn-forest, if you try to pass in September where you can pass so easily in Spring. A soft incline, at first sloping smoothly under the full sunshine--by-and-by more rugged and broken, with something that looks half like the ancient channel of a hill-spring, breaking all the soft pasture-grass into a rough projecting outline, like a miniature coast--and now a low hedge rough with thorns and brambles, instead of the dyke; for, after all, this is no gentle southland hill, but one of the warders of the Scottish Border, waving his plumed cap proudly in the fresh spring air, as he looks over the low-lying debatable moors on the other side, and defies the fells of Cumberland. If this were June, as it is April, you would see foliage clustering richly about the bold brow which he lifts to the clouds; just now the branches hang down, like long light brown ringlets, half unravelled with the spring rain and morning dew, and droop upon his falling shoulders as low as this green nest here, so sheltered and solitary, which he holds in his expanded arms.