great farm, with its picturesque outbuildings, and the range of
woody hills beyond. It is impossible not to pause a moment at that
gate, the landscape, always beautiful, is so suited to the season
and the hour,--so bright, and gay, and spring-like. But May, who
has the chance of another rabbit in her pretty head, has galloped
forward to the dingle, and poor May, who follows me so faithfully in
all my wanderings, has a right to a little indulgence in hers. So
to the dingle we go.

At the end of the field, which when seen from the road seems
terminated by a thick dark coppice, we come suddenly to the edge of
a ravine, on one side fringed with a low growth of alder, birch, and
willow, on the other mossy, turfy, and bare, or only broken by
bright tufts of blossomed broom. One or two old pollards almost
conceal the winding road that leads down the descent, by the side of
which a spring as bright as crystal runs gurgling along. The dell
itself is an irregular piece of broken ground, in some parts very
deep, intersected by two or three high banks of equal irregularity,
now abrupt and bare, and rocklike, now crowned with tufts of the
feathery willow or magnificent old thorns. Everywhere the earth is
covered by short, fine turf, mixed with mosses, soft, beautiful, and
various, and embossed with the speckled leaves and lilac flowers of
the arum, the paler blossoms of the common orchis, the enamelled
blue of the wild hyacinth, so splendid in this evening light, and
large tufts of oxslips and cowslips rising like nosegays from the
short turf.

The ground on the other side of the dell is much lower than the
field through which we came, so that it is mainly to the
labyrinthine intricacy of these high banks that it owes its singular