They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes,
sometimes getting over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it
dropped at a touch of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of
bricks and beams overgrown with grass, marking the site of deserted
works. They followed paths and tracks, however slight. Mounds
where the grass was rank and high, and where brambles, dock-weed,
and such-like vegetation, were confusedly heaped together, they
always avoided; for dismal stories were told in that country of the
old pits hidden beneath such indications.
The sun was high when they sat down to rest. They had seen no one,
near or distant, for a long time; and the solitude remained
unbroken. 'It is so still here, Rachael, and the way is so
untrodden, that I think we must be the first who have been here all
the summer.'
As Sissy said it, her eyes were attracted by another of those
rotten fragments of fence upon the ground. She got up to look at
it. 'And yet I don't know. This has not been broken very long.
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