178 PEPACTON 



English landscape is like a parb, and is so thor- 

 oughly rural and mellow and bosky that the tempta- 

 tion to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one. 

 In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbid- 

 ding; has not that maternal and beneficent look, is 

 less mindful of man, runs to briers and weeds or to 

 naked sterility. 



Then as a people the English are a private, 

 domestic, homely folk: they dislike publicity, dis- 

 like the highway, dislike noise, and love to feel the 

 grass under their feet. They have a genius for 

 lanes and footpaths; one might almost say they 

 invented them. The charm of them is in their 

 books; their rural poetry is modeled upon them. 

 How much of Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of 

 pedestrianism ! A footpath is sacred in England; 

 the king himself cannot close one ; the courts recog- 

 nize them as something quite as important and 

 inviolable as the highway. 



A footpath is of slow growth, and it is a wild, 

 shy thing that is easily scared away. The plow 

 must respect it, and the fence or hedge make way 

 for it. It requires a settled state of things, un- 

 changing habits among the people, and long tenure 

 of the land; the rill of life that finds its way there 

 must have a perennial source, and flow there to- 

 morrow and the next day and the next century. 



When I was a youth and went to school with my 

 brothers we had a footpath a mile long. On going 

 from home after leaving the highway there was a 

 descent through a meadow, then through a large 



