ng can be straighter and smoother than a Surrey road--when it is
on the king's business; then it is a high-road and behaves accordingly:
but a Surrey bye-road is the most whimsical companion in the world. It
is like a sheep-dog, always running backwards and forwards, poking into
the most out-of-the-way corners, now climbing at a run some steep
hummock of the down, and now leisurely going miles about to escape an
ant-hill; and all the time (here, by the way, ends the sheep-dog) it is
stopping to gossip with rillets vagabond as itself, or loitering to
bedeck itself with flowers. It seems as innocent of a destination as a
boy on an errand; but, after taking at least six times as long as any
other road in the kingdom for its amount of work, you usually find it
dip down of a sudden into some lovely natural cul-de-sac, a
meadow-bottom surrounded by trees, with a stream spreading itself in
fantastic silver shallows through its midst, and a cottage half hidden
at the end. Had the lane been going to some great house, it would have
made more haste, we may be sure.

The lane I had been following had finally dropped me down at something
of a run upon just such a scene. The cottage, built substantially of
grey stone, stood upon the side of the slope, and a broad strip of
garden, half cultivated and half wild, began near the house with
cabbages, and ended in a jungle of giant bulrushes as it touched the
stream. Golden patches of ragwort blazed here and there among a tangled
mass of no doubt worthier herbage,--such even in nature is the power of
gold,--and there were the usual birds.

However, my business is with the week's washing, which in various
shades of white, with occasional patches of scarlet, fluttered
fantastically across a space of the garden, thereby giving unmistakable
witness to human inhabitants, male and female.

As I lounged upon the green bank, I lazily watched these parodies of
humanity as they were tossed hither and thither with humourous
indignity by the breeze, remarking to myself on the quaint
shamelessness with which we thus expose to the public view garments
which at other times we are at such bashful pains to conceal. And thus
philosophising, like a much greater philosopher, upon clothes, I found
myself involuntarily deducing the cottage family from the family
washing. I soon decided that there must be at least one woman say of
the age of fifty, one young woman, one little child, sex doubtful, and
one