The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few lonely, wind-swept farms.  The villages tend to nestle along the roots of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route for the pack-horse of the pilgrim—­a chance of seeing if danger threatened or risk awaited him.

And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and untrimmed, along the broad back of the down.  Here for a space it is absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools by sheep.  In places it passes for a space through patches of old woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked.  Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a memory even of forgotten things.  To right and left green roads dip down to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down.

There is no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old drift-road.  The hedges are in full leaf, and the undergrowth, sprinkled with flowers, weaves its tapestry over the barer stems of the quicksets.  The thrushes sing clear in the tiny thickets, and the blackbird flirts with a sudden outcry in and out of his leafy harbourage.  Here the hedge is all hung with briony or traveller’s joy; there is a burst of wild-roses, pale discs of faintest rose-jacinth, each with a full-seeded heart.  The elder spreads its wide cakes of bloom, and the rich scent hangs heavy on the air.  One seems in a moment to penetrate the very heart of the deep country-side, and even the shepherd or the labourer whom one passes shares the silence of the open field, and the same immemorial quality of quiet simplicity and primitive work.  It is then that there flashes upon one a sense of the inexplicable mystery of these inexpressive lives, toiling to live and living to toil, half pathetic, half dignified, wholly mysterious in the lie that they give, by their meek persistence, to restless ambitions and dreams of social amelioration.  For, whatever happens,