Well known indeed it was. Each cottage stood on its accustomed site, each tree wore its familiar appearance. Habit had graven uneraseably on my memory, every turn and change of object on the road. At a short distance beyond the Little Park, was an elm half blown down by a storm, some ten years ago; and still, with leafless snow-laden branches, it stretched across the pathway, which wound through a meadow, beside a shallow brook, whose brawling was silenced by frost⁠—that stile, that white gate, that hollow oak tree, which doubtless once belonged to the forest, and which now showed in the moonlight its gaping rent; to whose fanciful appearance, tricked out by the dusk into a resemblance of the human form, the children had given the name of Falstaff;⁠—all these objects were as well known to me as the cold hearth of my deserted home, and every moss-grown wall and plot of orchard ground, alike as twin lambs are to each other in a stranger’s eye, yet to my accustomed gaze bore differences, distinction, and a name. England remained, though England was dead⁠—it was the ghost of merry England that I beheld, under those greenwood shade passing generations had sported in security and ease.