Meanwhile Master Thomas Marsh and his man Ralph were threading the devious paths–then, as now, most pseudonymously dignified with the name of roads–that wound between Marston Hall and the frontier of Romney Marsh. Their progress was comparatively slow; for, though the brown mare was as good a roadster as a man might back and the gelding no mean nag of his hands, yet the tracks, rarely traversed save by the rude wains of the day, miry in the ‘bottoms, ’ and covered with loose and rolling stones on the higher grounds, rendered barely passable the perpetual alternation of hill and valle