He retires, and we all rush to the windows and look out upon the quaint old village—­a curious, old-fashioned scene.  We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel.  Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against the blue sky behind them.

About six o’clock our fly is at the door, and we are off, rattling through the ancient streets into the smooth open country.  Oh the quaint, delightful old hedge-lined road, deep down below the level of the fields on either side—­a green lane shut in with fragrance and delicious quiet!  The hedges, perched upon the bank, tower high above our heads, and there is no break in them save at rustic gates.  We meet characters on the road who have just stepped out of Trollope’s novels.  A young man and girl stand on a bridge across which we trundle, leaning companionably on the old stone parapet, and looking up the little river through a long avenue of trees to the pillared mansion of “Broadlands.”  A laborer, with a gay flower stuck in the buttonhole of his smock-frock, goes whistling along the brown road under the hedgerows.  A country gentleman, driving alone in a basket phaeton, looks inquisitively at our half-closed windows as if expecting the sight of an acquaintance.  Crumbling milestones stand by the wayside, with deep-cut letters so smoothed by the hand of time that we cannot read them as we pass.  Flowers grow thick in the hedgerows.  A boy is lolling on the green grass in front of a cottage door—­an uncombed English hind, with a face of rustic simplicity and stolid ignorance.

At last we come to a gate which bars the road.  The driver gets down and opens it, and when we have passed through in the fly he tells us we are now on Mr. Stanley’s broad estate of Paultons.  The driver wears corduroy trousers, and touches his hat every time we speak to him and every time he answers.  He does not merely touch it when he is first addressed, but he touches it continually throughout the conversation.  Bunker considers his conduct extremely touching.

We are presently driving through a bosky wood, and the driver touches his hat to remark that we are nearly there now, he thinks.

“But where is the bad road the landlord spoke of?”

“Bad road, sir?” touching hat.

“Yes:  the landlord said we could not drive fast because the road was bad.  Where is it bad?”

“All along back of ’ere, sir,” touching hat.  “We have pahst the worst of it naow, sir:  the rest is not so ’illy, sir,” touching hat.

“Hilly?  We haven’t passed over anything bigger than a knoll.  If this is what the landlord meant by a hilly road, it is a rich joke.  Why, it’s as smooth as a floor, almost.”