ides a small quantity of not very rich
grass, and a few wild flowers, were the only produce of the ground,
except the trees that I have mentioned; and the only tenants of the
place were a few sheep, by far too lean to need any one to look after
them. On the edges of the common, indeed, might be found an occasional
goose or two, but they were like the white settlers on the coast of
Africa: venturing rarely and timidly into the interior. A high road went
across this track, as I have shown; but it being necessary, from time to
time, that farmers' carts, and other conveyances, horses, waggons,
tinkers' asses, and flocks of sheep, should cross it in different
directions, and as each of these travelling bodies, in common with the
world in general, liked to have a way of its own, the furze and fern had
been cut down in many long straight lines; and paths for horse and foot,
as well as long tracks of wheels, and deep ruts, crossed and recrossed
each other all over the common. To have seen it--nay, to see it now, for
it exists very nearly in its primeval state--one would suppose, from all
the various tracks, that it was a place of great thoroughfare, when, to
say truth, though I have crossed it some twenty times or more, I never
saw any travelling thing upon it but a solitary tax-cart and a gipsy's
van.
It was just about the middle of this common, then, that Wilton Brown, as
I have said, perceived another horseman riding along at the same slow
pace as himself. Their faces were both turned one way, with a few
hundred yards between them; and it appeared to the young gentleman, that
the other personage whom we have mentioned was coming in an oblique line
towards the high road to which he himself was journeying. This
supposition proved to be correct, as the stranger, riding along the path
that he was following, came abreast of Wilton Brown upon the high road,
just at the spot where a comfortable direction-post pointed with the
forefinger of a rude hand carved in the wood, along a path to the left,
bearing inscribed, in large letters, "To Woburn."
The young traveller examined the other with a hasty but marking glance,
and perceived thereby, that he was a stout man of the middle age,
between the unpleasant ages of forty and fifty, but without any loss of
power or activity. He was mounted on a strong black horse, had a quick
and eager eye, and altogether possessed a fine countenance, but there
was some degree of shy suspicion in his look, which did not seem to
indicate