The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF NATURAL BEAUTY

on, therefore, quite at ease - Ponto taking charge of
my gun -until at length, just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous little glades that led
hither and thither were intended to be paths at all,
I was conducted by one of the most promising of
them into an unquestionable carriage-track. There
could be no mistaking it. The traces of light wheels
were evident; and although the tall shrubberies and
overgrown undergrowth met overhead, there was no
obstruction whatever below, even to the passage of a
Virginian mountain wagon -the most aspiring vehicle, I take it, of its kind. C(The road, however, except
in being open through the wood —if wood be not
too weighty a name for such an assemblage of light
trees - and except in the particulars of evident wheeltracks, bore no resemblance to any road I had before
seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly
perceptible, having been impressed upon the firm, yet
pleasantly moist surface of - what looked more like
green Genoese velvet than anything else. It was
grass, clearly, but grass such as we seldom see out of
England - so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in
color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheelroute, not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that
once obstructed the way had been carefully placed,
not thrown, along the sides of the lane, so as to
define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of halfprecise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque, definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere luxuriantly in the interspaces.
What to make of all this, of course I knew not.
Here was art undoubtedly -that did not surprise
me- all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of
nor can I say that there was much to wonder at
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