Friend, or Quaker, to inquire the way to the Alderman's farm, he
invited me to take tea with him, and be his guest for the night,--a
hospitality which I very gladly accepted, as it was a longer walk
than I had anticipated. After tea, my host, who was a farmer as
well as miller, took me over his fields, and showed me his live
stock, his crops of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and roots, which
were all large and luxuriant, and looked a tableau vivant of plenty
within the green hedges that enclosed and adorned them.

The next morning, after breakfast, my kind host set me on the way to
Tiptree by a footpath through alternating fields of wheat, barley,
oats, beans, and turnips, into which an English farm is generally
divided. These footpaths are among the vested interests of the
walking public throughout the United Kingdom. Most of them are
centuries old. The footsteps of a dozen generations have given them
the force and sanctity of a popular right. A farmer might as well
undertake to barricade the turnpike road as to close one of these
old paths across his best fields. So far from obstructing them, he
finds it good policy to straighten and round them up, and supply
them with convenient gates or stiles, so that no one shall have an
excuse for trampling on his crops, or for diverging into the open
field for a shorter cut to the main road. Blessings on the man who
invented them! It was done when land was cheap, and public roads
were few; before four wheels were first geared together for business
or pleasure. They were the doing of another age; this would not
have produced them. They run through all the prose, poetry, and
romance of the rural life of England, permeating the history of
green hedges, thatched cottages, morning songs of the lark,
moonlight walks, meetings at the stile, harvest homes of long ago,
and many a romantic narrative of human experience widely read in