But mark what follows.

In the late afternoon I would be back in the road or footpath, satisfied to go slow, then slower still, until--the snail in woman shape would be obliged to slacken her pace to keep me company, and even to stand still at intervals to give me needful rest.
But there were compensations, and one, perhaps the best of all, was that this method of seeing the country made us more intimate with the people we met and stayed with.

They were mostly poor people, cottagers in small remote villages; and we, too, were poor, often footsore, in need of their ministrations, and nearer to them on that account than if we had travelled in a more comfortable way.

I can recall a hundred little adventures we met with during those wanderings, when we walked day after day, without map or guide-book as our custom was, not knowing where the evening would find us, but always confident that the people to whom it would fall in the end to shelter us would prove interesting to know and would show us a kindness that money could not pay for.

Of these hundred little incidents let me relate one.
It was near the end of a long summer day when we arrived at a small hamlet of about a dozen cottages on the edge of an extensive wood--a forest it is called; and, coming to it, we said that here we must stay, even if we had to spend the night sitting in a porch.