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Those four hours—joyfully down dale and up hill to another glimpse of a receding heaven, and then down dale again, not quite so springily—those four hours Laura never forgot. Each incident of the road—the stumble-stone that cut her knee: a bolting rabbit startling itself and her, and the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it stiffly like an Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that frightened her into ditches, and once a nettle-bed: that black wood where, through dead leaves, her own shadow had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were the echoes of her own: the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trailing and tropical, like pictures in the Swiss Family Robinson, with mighty garlands of old-man’s beard: a village pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies: babies on door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: dust and sunshine and the terrible tramps—each and all had been etched indelibly upon a mind that excitement had made more than ever sensitive to impressions.