82 A Walk from 



the stirring heraldry of its horn coming down the road, 

 its rattling wheels, the life and stir aroused and moved 

 in its wake, all this has gone from the presence of a 

 higher civilisation. It will never reappear in future 

 pictures of actual life in England. It is all gone where 

 the hedges and hedgerow trees will probably go in their 

 turn. But the same village inn remains, and can be as 

 easily recognised as a widow in weeds, who still wears a 

 hopeful face, and makes the best of her bereavement. 



But that humbler type of hostelry so often repre- 

 sented in sketches of English rural life and scenery 

 the little, cosy, one-story, wayside, or hamlet inn, with 

 its thatched roof, checker- work window, low door, and 

 with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it, while the 

 driver, in his round wool hat, and in his smock-frock, 

 is drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on 

 his horse's neck this the hand of modern improvements 

 has not yet reached. This may be found still in a 

 thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with all its 

 rural associations ; the green, the geese, and gray 

 donkeys feeding side by side ; low-jointed cottages, 

 with long, sloping roofs greened over with moss or 

 grass, and other objects usually shadowed dimly in the 

 background of the picture. It is these quiet hamlets 

 and houses in the still depths of the country, away 

 from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion, 



