works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have
not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will
carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single
farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the
dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony
discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of
ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore
years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the
fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and
some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven
had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and
fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I
looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen,
surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three
little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw
that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at
my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except
where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the
brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my