222 
NATURE NOTES. 
grassy and pleasant, unfrequented, bordered by high hedges, 
and often fitting in, as continuations, with the field-paths them- 
selves. 
England is surely the land of green lanes and fieldpaths ; no 
other country can boast of anything like these. Our land is 
the land of fields and hedgerows, of paths and green lanes, and 
in whatever country we go, these will be sought for and sadly 
missed, by many who have wandered through them in our own 
delightful England. 
An intelligent Englishwoman, bred among these country 
scenes of ours, had once to spend some years with her family 
in the United States of America, and she expressed her great 
disappointment at finding it utterly impossible to enjoy nature 
there as she used to do. There was, she said, so much nature, 
and yet no way of getting at it ; no paths or by-ways, or stiles 
or foot-bridges ; no provision for the pedestrian outside of the 
public road. One would think, she said, that the people had 
no feet and legs, or else did not know how to use them. 
Spending one summer season near a small rural village in the 
valley of the Connecticut, it seemed as if she had not been in 
the country ; she could not come at the landscape, she could 
not reach a wood or a hill or a pretty nook anywhere without 
being a trespasser, or getting entangled in swamps or in fields 
of grass or grain, or having her course blocked by a high and 
difficult fence ; there were no private ways, no grassy lanes, 
nobody walking in the fields or woods, nobody walking any- 
where for pleasure, but everybody on horseback or in carriages. 
Stopping a mile from the village, she used every day to walk- 
down to the post-office for her letters, but instead of a short 
and pleasant cut across the fields, as she would have had in 
England, she was obliged to take the highway and face the 
dust and the wind and the staring people in their carriages. 
She complained, too, of the absence of bird-songs ; the fields 
and groves and orchards were quite silent compared with what 
she had been used to in England ; the only noticeable sound 
everywhere was, she added, the shrill crescendo of the locust. 
An enthusiastic American, in replying to this criticism, puts 
in a plea for the kingbird and the bobolink, as so full of music 
when they arrive, that he is loth to believe there is anything in 
England fuller or finer than their notes. But he admits very 
readily that as walkers and lovers of rural scenes and pastimes, 
they do not by any means approach their British cousins, and 
he adds that it is a seven days’ wonder to see anybody walking 
in their country except as an exhibition and trial of endurance. 
This seems a regrettable taste on the part of our American 
cousins, as it certainly deprives them of one of the greatest 
pleasures that a lover of Nature in our own land can derive 
from rambles along green lanes and field-paths. Those only 
who know and love these rambles can be really said to know 
our country at all. Highways and roads go over it, indeed, in 
