At Length I Came To A Road,
And As It Happened To Be On My Left Hand I Followed It.
It
was narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper,
rougher, and more untrodden as I progressed,
Until it was
like the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and I walked on
boulder-stones between steep banks about fourteen feet high.
Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass and rank moss;
their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing
branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like
shoots of bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I
seemed to be walking in a dimly lighted tunnel. At length,
thinking that I had kept long enough to a road which had
perhaps not been used for a century, also tired of the
monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the
right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a
low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through
the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level
plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and
scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees.
Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent
of country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken,
but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the
recent rain had intensified. There is too much green, to my
thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone,
in South Devon.
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