Thus this simple farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of time.

Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer find any recognition in our daily routine: _Above all, worship thou the gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings_.
Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our memories.

We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee, our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills.

On our left hand, parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations.

So the old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in the lonelier country districts of England.