352 OLD ROADS. 



times forming knolls and coppices of inimitable beauty ; 

 and often an irregular row of trees and- shrubs of different 

 species gives intricacy and variety to the scene. 



And how much more delightful is a ride or a stroll 

 over one of these narrow roads, than through the most 

 highly ornamented suburbs of our cities, with their 

 avenues of more convenient width! The very neglect 

 to which they have been left, together with the small 

 amount of travelling over them, has caused numberless 

 beauties to spring up in their borders. In these places 

 Nature seems to have regained her sovereignty. The 

 squirrel runs freely along the walls, and the hare may 

 be seen peeping timidly out of her burrow at their 

 foundation, or leaping across the road. The hazel- 

 bushes often form a natural hedgerow for whole fur- 

 longs ; and the sparrow and the robin, and even some 

 of the less familiar birds, build their nests in the green 

 thickets of barberries, viburnums, cornels, and whortle- 

 berry-bushes that grow in irregular rows and tufts along 

 the rough and varied embankments. 



Near any old road we seldom meet an artificial 

 object that is made disagreeable by its manifest preten- 

 sions. Little one-story cottages are frequent, with their 

 green slope in front, and a maple or an elm that affords 

 them shelter and shade. The old stone-wall festooned 

 with wild grape-vines comes close up to their enclosures ; 

 and on one side of the house the garden is seen with its 

 unpretending neatness, its few morning-glories trained 

 up against the walls, its beds of scarlet-runners reared 

 upon trellises formed of the bended branches of the 

 white-birch driven into the soil, its few rose-bushes 

 of those beautiful kinds which have long been natural- 

 ized in our gardens. When I behold these objects in their 

 Arcadian simplicity, I lose all faith in the magnificent 

 splendors of princely gardens. I feel persuaded that in 



