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For a brief space, however, a foot-way through a succession of green fields, all of them sparkling with the dew, was at our command, and we gratefully availed ourselves of it; for it is one of the advantages which a pedestrian enjoys over the traveller, either in a carriage or on horseback, that, provided he be sure of the direction in which his object lies, he may cast both highways and bridle-paths behind him.
Leaving the servants to take care of the luggage, they strolled along over a carpet of wild-flowers, through winding bridle-paths, where glances of bright water here and there gleamed through the dark pines that were singing their sleepy chorus, with its lulling sound of the sea, and filling the air with their aromatic breath.
Middleton Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways. Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks.
A sharp lookout was maintained for signs indicative of their approach to the neighbourhood of plantations, and two or three bridle-paths, evidently leading to such, were crossed; but at length they reached the welcome skirts of the forest without having had the least cause to suppose that they had been observed.
Soon I was out of the village and ascending the steep road towards the Pass of Cisa that leads over the Apennines to Pontremoli. This way had Hannibal come when he penetrated into Etruria some two thousand years ago. I quitted the road and took to bridle-paths under the shoulder of the mighty Mount Prinzera.
By 'roads' must be understood bridle-paths, worn by traffic alone across the gravelly valleys, but elsewhere constructed with great toil and expense, as Nature compels, the road-maker to follow her lead, and carry his track along the narrow valleys, ravines, gorges, and chasms which she has marked out for him.
The trouble with most folks nowadays was that they had been trotting the thoroughfares of every-day commonplaces so long they had got dust in their eyes till they couldn't see the bridle-paths of the Unusual, but that didn't prove that Romance wasn't doing business at the same old stand.
To reach the little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations; days must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas at country inns; and after flaying your back on the carding-combs of impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridle-paths above precipices; and at last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no pastures, no torrents; nothing nothing but total solitude, and silence unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be found.
Soon it became a fixed habit with us, from which I think we never varied, to descend from our Downs every Sunday and walk by a series of delightful bridle-paths to The Ridgeway for tea a serious institution in a family where there were two girls and four boys.
They tried to use him in carrying papers, but the subscribers objected to having him ridden up to their front doors over the sidewalk, and they had to give it up. When he became an old story, and there was no competition for him among the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure.
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