"
Mr. Fairfax groaned. He held the not uncommon opinion that wit and
spirit endanger a man's peace and rule in a house. And yet in the case
of his son Laurence's Xantippe he had evidence enough that nothing in
nature is so discordant and intractable as a fool. Then he fell into a
silence, and turned his horse off the highway upon the margin of sward
at one side of it. Mr. John Short took the other; and so Bessie and the
boys soon lost sight of them.
It was a beautiful forest-road when they had crossed the heath. No
hedges shut it in, but here and there the great beech trees stood in
clumps or in single grace, and green rides opened vistas into cool
depths of shade which had never changed but with the seasons for many
ages. It was quite old-world scenery here. Neither clearings nor
enclosures had been thought of, and the wild sylvan beauty had all its
own perfect way. Presently there were signs of habitation. A curl of
smoke from a low roof so lost in its orchard that but for that domestic
flag it might have escaped observation altogether; a triangular green
with a pond, geese and pigs; more thatched cottages, gardens, small
fields, large hedges, high, bushy, unpruned; hedgerow trees; a lonely
little chapel in a burial-ground, a woodyard, a wheelwright's shop, a
guide-post pointing three ways, a blacksmith's forge at one side of the
road, and an old inn opposite; cows, unkempt children; white gates,
gravelled drives, chimney-pots of gentility, hidden away in bowers of
foliage.
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