“I lay last night in the cosiest meadow ever I have been in. The very rural hamlet of Bunny, Notts, is a quarter of a mile away, but all the world is screened away from me with trees and hedges. I have for meadow-mates two intelligent cows, who can’t quite make us out. They couldn’t make Bob out either, till in the zeal of his guardianship he got one of them by the tail. There is in this hamlet of three hundred souls one inn—it is tottering to decay—a pound, a police-station, and a church. The church is ever so old, the weather-cock has long been blown down, and the clock has stopped for ever. The whole village is about as lively and bright as a farthing candle stuck in an empty beer bottle.
“But here come the horses. Good-bye till we meet.
“Gordon Stables,—
“Ye Gentleman Gipsy.”
Chapter Fifteen.
The Humours of the Road—Inn Signs—What I am Taken for—A Study of Faces—Milestones and Finger-Posts—Tramps—The Man with the Iron Mask—The Collie Dog—Gipsies’ Dogs—A Midnight Attack on the Wanderer.
“I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”
Dryden.
Madly dashing on through the country as cyclists do, on their way to John o’ Groats or elsewhere, probably at an average rate of seventy miles a day, neither scenery nor anything else can be either enjoyed or appreciated.