Page:Strange Roads & With the Gods in Spring.djvu/36

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Strange Roads

on the hottest day in summer, there was coolness and a pleasant green shade.

The lane was narrow and steep, but it was well enough for the slow farm traffic, for the parson's trap and the doctor's gig. But a wealthy city man has a house and many motor cars in that part. And so one year I found that beautiful lane destroyed. All the oak trees had been cut down; the road had been straightened, as if it were the permanent way of a railway; the banks had been sliced on either side in the fashion of a railway cutting. They were bare. Flowers and ferns,

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