When I had gone some hundred yards towards the Roman road I saw, bending lower than the rest on the tree from which it hung, a golden bough, and I said to myself that I had had good luck, for such a thing has always been the sign of an unusual experience and of a voyage among the dead.  All the other leaves of the tree were green, but the turn of the year, which sends out foragers just as the spring does, marking the way it is to go, had come and touched this bough and changed it, so that it shone out by itself in the recesses of the forest and gleamed before and behind.  I did not ask what way it led me, for I knew; and so I went onwards, riding my horse, until I came to that long bank of earth which runs like a sort of challenge through this ancient land to prove what our origins were, and who first brought us merry people into the circuit of the world.

When I saw the Roman road the sharper influence which it had had upon my boyhood returned to me, and I got off my horse and took his bit out of his mouth so that he could play the fool with the grass and leaves (which are bad for him), and I hitched the snaffle to a little broken peg of bough so that he could not wander.  And then I looked up and down along the boles of the great North Wood, taking in the straight line of the way.

I have heard it said that certain professors, the most learned of their day, did once deny that this was a Roman road.  I can well believe it, and it is delightful to believe that they did.  For this road startles and controls a true man, presenting an eternal example of what Rome could do.  The peasants around have always called it the “Street.”  It leads from what was certainly one Roman town to what was certainly another.  That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word “Cold Harbour,” is scattered up and down it.  There are Roman pavements on it.  It goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the down.  Here, then, was a feast for the learned:  since certainly the more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it.  And deny it they did (or at least, so I am told), just as they will deny that Thomas a Becket was a Papist, or that Austerlitz was fought in spite of Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of St. John is the Gospel of St. John.

Here then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of such men, and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don might be at that moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away, and I was very glad:  for it permitted me to contemplate the road with common sense and with Faith, which is Common Sense transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill.  I remembered also what a sight there was upon the down above, and I got upon my horse again to go and see it.