game at romps, 'making a sunshine in the shady place;' Lizzy
rolling, laughing, clapping her hands, and glowing like a rose;
Mayflower playing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes
with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks, and her
escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same
momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has
exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease and
strength and grace. What a pretty picture they would make; what a
pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape! The road
winding down the hill with a slight bend, like that in the High
Street at Oxford; a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing
it at a full trot--(ah! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly desert you
to have a gambol with that blood-horse!) half-way down, just at the
turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the
very image of comfort and content; farther down, on the opposite
side, the small white dwelling of the little mason; then the limes
and the rope-walk; then the village street, peeping through the
trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys, and various
roofs of the houses, and here and there some angle of a wall;
farther on, the elegant town of B----, with its fine old
church-towers and spires; the whole view shut in by a range of
chalky hills and over every part of the picture, trees so profusely
scattered, that it appears like a woodland scene, with glades and
villages intermixed. The trees are of all kinds and all hues,
chiefly the finely-shaped elm, of so bright and deep a green, the
tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp and
garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just now
so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves.
Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm
of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right