About six o'clock our fly is at the door, and we are off, rattling through the ancient streets into the smooth open country. Oh the quaint, delightful old hedge-lined road, deep down below the level of the fields on either side—a green lane shut in with fragrance and delicious quiet! The hedges, perched upon the bank, tower high above our heads, and there is no break in them save at rustic gates. We meet characters on the road who have just stepped out of Trollope's novels. A young man and girl stand on a bridge across which we trundle, leaning companionably on the old stone parapet, and looking up the little river through a long avenue of trees to the pillared mansion of "Broadlands." A laborer, with a gay flower stuck in the buttonhole of his smock-frock, goes whistling along the brown road under the hedgerows. A country gentleman, driving alone in a basket phaeton, looks inquisitively at our half-closed windows as if expecting the sight of an acquaintance. Crumbling milestones stand by the wayside, with deep-cut letters so smoothed by the hand of time that we cannot read them as we pass. Flowers grow thick in the hedgerows. A boy is lolling on the green grass in front of a cottage door—an uncombed English hind, with a face of rustic simplicity and stolid ignorance.
At last we come to a gate which bars the road. The driver gets down and opens it, and when we have passed through in the fly he tells us we are now on Mr. Stanley's broad estate of Paultons. The driver wears corduroy trousers, and touches his hat every time we speak to him and every time he answers. He does not merely touch it when he is first addressed, but he touches it continually throughout the conversation. Bunker considers his conduct extremely touching.
We are presently driving through a bosky wood, and the driver touches his hat to remark that we are nearly there now, he thinks.
"But where is the bad road the landlord spoke of?"
"Bad road, sir?" touching hat.
"Yes: the landlord said we could not drive fast because the road was bad. Where is it bad?"
"All along back of 'ere, sir," touching hat. "We have pahst the worst of it naow, sir: the rest is not so 'illy, sir," touching hat.
"Hilly? We haven't passed over anything bigger than a knoll. If this is what the landlord meant by a hilly road, it is a rich joke. Why, it's as smooth as a floor, almost."
"He should go to California," says Amy, who has feeling reminiscences. "He should go to the Yosemite Valley, over the road which runs through Chinese Camp and Hodgden's. Probably the man never saw a rough road in his life. I doubt if there is such a thing in England."
After half an hour's trundling along the unfenced roads of this fine old estate, crossing ancient stone bridges, rolling through leafy groves, startling fat cattle from their browsing, getting a hat-touch from a shepherd who is leading his flocks across the fields in true pastoral style, we reach the manor-house, standing stately amid dells and dingles, pollards of fantastic growth and patches of fern and gorse. The Boyces have returned to Paris, but nurse and the children are still at the gardener's house, and thither we drive along the banks of a sylvan lake, beyond which the rooks are cawing about the chimneys.