The hedges, in their tangle of sweetbriar and sloebush and bramble, which fringe the well-kept highways and leafy lanes, lead past sleepy little towns to scattered groups of cottages, -- splashes and dots of red amidst festoons of green, -- some on hilly ground where the square flint-church tower breaks the skyline; some by "dewy pastures," or nestling in dells -- native scenes which Gainsborough and Constable painted; villages where a fair-haired, open-faced peasantry greet one in a dialect whose every sentence ends in a rising note, and betrays the source of the nasal twang which the Puritans carried to the New World.