e natural flow of
intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever
since. An American fanner would plough across any such path, and
obliterate it with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is
protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably
springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined footprints of
centuries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English
nostrils: we pull them up as weeds.

I remember such a path, the access to which is from Lovers' Grove, a
range of tall old oaks and elms on a high hill-top, whence there is a
view of Warwick Castle, and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful,
though bedimmed with English mist. This particular foot-path, however,
is not a remarkably good specimen of its kind, since it leads into no
hollows and seclusions, and soon terminates in a high-road. It connects
Leamington by a short cut with the small neighboring village of
Lillington, a place which impresses an American observer with its many
points of contrast to the rural aspects of his own country. The village
consists chiefly of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated only by
party-walls, but ill-matched among themselves, being of different
heights, and apparently of various ages, though all are of an antiquity
which we should call venerable. Some of the windows are leaden-framed
lattices, opening on hinges. These houses are mostly built of gray
stone; but others, in the same range, are of brick, and one or two are
in a very old fashion,--Elizabethan, or still older,--having a ponderous
framework of oak, painted black, and filled in with plastered stone or
bricks. Judging by the patches of repair, the oak seems to be the more
durable part of the structure. Some of the roofs are covered with
earthen tiles; others (more decayed and poverty-stricken) with thatch,
out of which sprouts a luxurious vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and
yellow flowers. What especially strikes an American is the lack of that
insulated space, the intervening gardens, grass-plots, orchards,
broad-spreading shade-trees, which occur between our own village-houses.
These English dwellings have no such separate surroundings; they all
grow together, like the cells of a honey-comb.

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it by a turn of the
road, there was another row (or block, as we should call it) of small,
old cottages, stuck one against another, with their thatched roofs
f