And the next day they went south, by
ways which are not so clear.
Just outside St. Alban's--Verulamium of the Romans (the ruins whereof were
believed to be full of ghosts, demons, and magic treasures)--they turned,
at St. Stephen's, to the left, off the Roman road to London; and by
another Roman road struck into the vast forest which ringed London round
from northeast to southwest. Following the upper waters of the Colne,
which ran through the woods on their left, they came to Watford, and then
turned probably to Rickmansworth. No longer on the Roman paved ways, they
followed horse-tracks, between the forest and the rich marsh-meadows of
the Colne, as far as Denham, and then struck into a Roman road again at
the north end of Langley Park. From thence, over heathy commons,--for that
western part of Buckinghamshire, its soil being light and some gravel, was
little cultivated then, and hardly all cultivated now,--they held on
straight by Langley town into the Vale of Thames.
Little they dreamed, as they rode down by Ditton Green, off the heathy
commons, past the poor, scattered farms, on to the vast rushy meadows,
while upon them was the dull weight of disappointment, shame, all but
despair; their race enslaved, their country a prey to strangers, and all
its future, like their own, a lurid blank,--little they dreamed of what
that vale would be within eight hundred years,--the eye of England, and it
may be of the world; a spot which owns more wealth and peace, more art and
civilization, more beauty and more virtue, it may be, than any of God's
gardens which make fair this earth.
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