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COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



Befron iEanes antr tfjetr Associations. 



THE great Italian poet, at the commencement of his song, finds 

 himself lost in a wood, dark, rugged, and solitary. We shall 

 begin by placing our readers in a labyrinth, bright, smiling, and 

 picturesque. Nothing is easier than to find this maze in the 

 outskirts of most Devonshire villages. The West is proverbially 

 the land of green lanes, and though you must not go too far 

 west, or the stone walls of the Cornish hills will disenchant 

 you, no one can find it hard to lose himself in the network of 

 lanes that surround any village in Devon. Let us transport 

 our reader, then, to the lanes that skirt the myrtles and fuchsias 

 of Budleigh-Salterton. Much like the " hollow lanes " of Hamp- 

 shire, about which Gilbert White discourses so lovingly, they 

 far surpass them in prodigality of floral wealth, and abrupt 

 change of scenery. Curious legends and old-world characters 

 are to be found in them ; railroads have for the most part 

 avoided them, and there are no more pleasant associations than 

 those which crowd upon the mind in threading these lanes at 

 any season of the year. 



Labyrinthine, indeed, are the lanes of South Devon to the 

 stranger who wanders in them, hopelessly enclosed by lofty 

 banks crowned with tall hedges, that twist in and out, and are 



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