Strange Roads
and leisurely fashion up a long, steep hill. The road was narrow and deep down in the ground. Every fern grew in splendour on those high banks; the wild strawberry was there, richly scarlet; the fretted leaves of the wild geranium were as if they had come from the margin of a golden, illuminated thirteenth-century missal; the arums showed purple rods in the spring and red berries in the autumn; meadowsweet flourished where wells of cold water trickled out of the limestone rock. And high overhead, strange, twisted, wizened oaks mingled their leaves across the road; and so here,
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