The Story Of A Path

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_ In one of his engaging essays Mr. John Burroughs tells of meeting an English lady in Holyoke, Mass., who complained to him that there were no foot-paths for her to walk on, whereupon the poet-naturalist was moved to an eloquent expression of his grief over America's inferiority in the foot-path line to the "mellow England" which in one brief month had won him for her own. Now I know very little of Holyoke, Mass., of my own knowledge. As a lecture-town I can say of it that its people are polite, but extremely undemonstrative, and that the lecturer is expected to furnish the refreshments. It is quite likely that the English lady was right, and that there are no foot-paths there.

I wish to say, however, that I know the English lady. I know her--many, many of her--and I have met her a-many times. I know the enchanted fairyland in which her wistful memory loves to linger. Often and often have I watched her father's wardian-case grow into "papa's hot-houses;" the plain brick house that he leases, out Notting Hill way, swell into "our family mansion," and the cottage that her family once occupied at Stoke Wigglesworth change itself into "the country place that papa had to give up because it took so much of his time to see that it was properly kept up." And long experience in this direction enables me to take that little remark about the foot-paths, and to derive from it a large amount of knowledge about Holyoke and its surroundings that I should not have had of my own getting, for I have never seen Holyoke except by night, nor am I like to see it again.

From that brief remark I know these things about Holyoke: It is surrounded by a beautiful country, with rolling hills and a generally diversified landscape. There are beautiful green fields, I am sure. There is a fine river somewhere about, and I think there must be water-falls and a pretty little creek. The timber must be very fine, and probably there are some superb New England elms. The roads must be good, uncommonly good; and there must be unusual facilities for getting around and picnicking and finding charming views and all that sort of thing.

Nor does it require much art to learn all this from that pathetic plaint about the foot-paths. For the game of the Briton in a foreign land is ever the same. It changes not from generation unto generation. Bid him to the feast and set before him all your wealth of cellar and garner. Spread before him the meat, heap up for him the fruits of the season. Weigh down the board with every vegetable that the gardener's art can bring to perfection in or out of its time--white-potatoes, sweet-potatoes, lima-beans, string-beans, fresh peas, sweet-corn, lettuce, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, musk-melons and water-melons--all you will--no word will you hear from him till he has looked over the whole assortment and discovered that you have not the vegetable marrow, and that you do not raise it. Then will he break forth and cry out for his vegetable marrow. All these things are naught to him if he cannot have his vegetable marrow, and he will tell you about the exceeding goodness and rarity of the vegetable marrow, until you will figure it in your mind like unto the famous mangosteen fruit of the Malay Peninsula, he who once eats whereof tastes never again any other fruit of the earth, finding them all as dust and ashes by the side of the mangosteen.

That is to say, this will happen unless you have eaten of the vegetable marrow, and have the presence of mind to recall to the Briton's memory the fact that it is nothing but a second-choice summer squash; after which the meal will proceed in silence. Just so might Mr. Burroughs have brought about a sudden change in the topic of conversation by telling the English lady that where the American treads out a path he builds a road by the side of it.

To tell the truth, I think that the English foot-path is something pathetic beyond description. The better it is, the older, the better worn, the more it speaks with a sad significance of the long established inequalities of old-world society. It means too often the one poor, pitiful right of a poor man, the man who must walk all his life, to go hither and thither through the rich man's country. The lady may walk it for pleasure if she likes, but the man who walks it because he must, turns up a little by-path leading from it to a cottage that no industry or thrift will make his own; and for him to aspire to a roadway to his front-door would be a gross piece of impertinence in a man of his station. It is the remembrance of just such right-of-way foot-paths as the English lady's sad heart yearned after that reconciles me to a great many hundreds of houses that have recently been built in the State of New Jersey after designs out of books that cost all the way from twenty-five cents to a dollar. Architecturally these are very much inferior to the English cottager's home, and they occasionally waken thoughts of incendiarism. But the people who live in them are people who insist on having roads right to their front-doors, and I have heard them do some mighty interesting talking in town-meeting about the way those roads shall be laid and who shall do the laying.

As I have before remarked, I am quite willing to believe that Holyoke is a pathless wilderness, in the English lady's sense. But when Mr. Burroughs makes the generalization that there are no foot-paths in this country, it seems to me he must be letting his boyhood get too far away from him.

For there are foot-paths enough, certainly. Of course an old foot-path in this country always serves to mark the line of a new road when the people who had worn it take to keeping horses. But there are thousands of miles of paths criss-crossing the countryside in all of our older States that will never see the dirt-cart or the stone-crusher in the lifetime of any man alive to-day.

Mr. Burroughs--especially when he is published in the dainty little Douglas duodecimos--is one of the authors whose books a busy man reserves for a pocket-luxury of travel. So it was that, a belated reader, I came across his lament over our pathlessness, some years after my having had a hand--or a foot, as you might say--in the making of a certain cross-lots foot-way which led me to study the windings and turnings of the longer countryside walks until I got the idea of writing "The Story of a Path." I am sorry to contradict Mr. Burroughs, but, if there are no foot-paths in America, what becomes of the many good golden hours that I have spent in well-tracked woodland ways and in narrow foot-lanes through the wind-swept meadow grass? I cannot give these up; I can only wish that Mr. Burroughs had been my companion in them.

A foot-path is the most human thing in inanimate nature. Even as the print of his thumb reveals the old offender to the detectives, so the path tells you the sort of feet that wore it. Like the human nature that created it, it starts out to go straight when strength and determination shape its course, and it goes crooked when weakness lays it out. Until you begin to study them you can have no notion of the differences of character that exist among foot-paths. One line of trodden earth seems to you the same as another. But look! Is the path you are walking on fairly straight from point to point, yet deflected to avoid short rises and falls, and is it worn to grade? That is, does it plough a deep way through little humps and hillocks something as a street is cut down to grade? If you see this path before you, you maybe sure that it is made by the heavy shuffle of workingmen's feet. A path that wavers from side to side, especially if the turns be from one bush to another, and that is only a light trail making an even line of wear over the inequalities of the ground--that is a path that children make. The path made by the business man--the man who is anxious to get to his work at one end of the day, and anxious to get to his home at the other--is generally a good piece of engineering. This type of man makes more paths in this country than he does in any other. He carries his intelligence and his energy into every act of life, and even in the half-unconscious business of making his own private trail he generally manages to find the line of least resistance in getting from one given point to another.

This is the story of a path:

It is called Reub Levi's Path, because Reuben Levi Dodd is supposed to have made it, some time in 1830 or thereabout, when he built his house on the hill. But it is much older than Reuben Levi. He probably thought he was telling the truth when, forty years ago, he swore to having broken the path himself twenty years before, through the Jacobus woods, down the hill and across the flat lands that then belonged to the Onderdoncks, and again through the Ogden woods to the county road; but he forgot that on the bright June day when he first started to find a convenient way through the woods and over the broad lowland fields from his own front-door to that of his father-in-law, Evert Ogden, and then through Mr. Ogden's patch of woods to the little town on the bank of the Passaic--he forgot that for a little part of the way he had had the help of a man whose feet had long before done with walking the paths of earth.

The forest, for it was a forest then, was full of heavy underwood and brush, and he had no choice but to dodge his way between the clumps. But when he got out to the broad open space on the brow of the hill, where no trees had ever grown, he found an almost tropical growth of wild grass and azalea, with bull-brier twining over everything in every direction. He found it worse than the dense woods.

"Drat the pesky stuff," he said to himself; "ain't there no way through it?" Then as he looked about he spied a line no broader than his hand at the bottom, that opened clean through the bull-brier and the bushes across the open to where the trees began again on the down-slope of the hill. Grass was growing in it, but he knew it for an old trail.

"'Twas Pelatiah Jinks made that, I'll bet a shilling," he said to himself, remembering the lonely old trapper who had dwelt on that mountain in his father's time. He had once seen old man Jinks's powder-horn, with its elaborate carving, done in the long solitary hours when the old man sat weather-bound in his lofty hermitage.

"Jest like the old critter to make a bee-line track like that. But what in thunder did he want to go that way across the clearing for? I'm much obleeged to him for his trail, but it ain't headed right for town."

No, it was not. But young Dodd did not remember that the trees whose tops he saw just peeping over the hill were young things of forty years' growth that had taken the place of a line of ninety-year-old chestnuts that had died down from the top and been broken down by the wind shortly after old Pelatiah died. The line that the old man had made for himself took him straight to the one little hillock where he could look over this tall screen and get his bearings afresh by the glint of the Passaic's water in the woody valley below, for at no other spot along that ridge was the Passaic visible.

Now in this one act of Reuben Levi Dodd you can see the human nature that lies at the bottom of all path-making. He turned aside from his straight course to walk in the easy way made by another man, and then fetched a compass, as they used to say in the Apostle Paul's time, to get back to his straight bearings. Old Pelatiah had a good reason for deviating from his straight line to the town; young Dodd had none, except that it was wiser to go two yards around than to go one yard straight through the bull-brier. Young Dodd had a powder-horn slung from his shoulder that morning, and the powder-horn had some carving on it, but it was not like the carving on old Pelatiah's horn. There was a letter R, cut with many flourishes, a letter L cut but wanting most of its flourishes, and a letter D half finished, and crooked at that, and without the first trace of a flourish. That was the way his powder-horn looked that day, for that was the way it looked when he died, and his son sold it to a dealer in antiquities.

Young Dodd and his wife found it lonely living up there on the hilltop. They were the first who had pushed so far back from the river and the town. Mrs. Dodd, who had an active and ambitious spirit in her, often reproached her husband for his neglect to make their home more accessible to her old friends in the distant town.

"If you'd take a bill-hook," she would say, "and clean up that snake-fence path of yours a little, may be folks would climb up here to see us once in a blue moon. It's all well enough for you with your breeches, but how are women folks to trail their frocks through that brush?"

Reub Levi would promise and promise, and once he did take his hook and chop out a hundred yards or so. But things did not mend until Big Bill Turnbull, known all over the county as the Hard Job Man, married a widow with five children, bought a little patch of five or six acres next to Dodd's big farm, built a log-cabin for himself and his family, and settled down there.

Now Turnbull's log-cabin was so situated that the line of old Pelatiah's path through the bull-brier, extended about an eighth of a mile, would just reach the front-door. Turnbull saw this, and it was at that point that he tapped Reub Levi's foot-path to the town. But he did his tapping after his own fashion. He took his wife's red flannel petticoat and tied it to a sapling on the top of the mound that the old hunter used to climb, and then with bill-hook and axe he cut a straight swath through the woods. He even cut down through the roots and took out the larger stones.

"That's what you'd ought to have done long ago, Reuben Levi Dodd," said his wife, as she watched this manifestation of energy.

"Guess I didn't lose much by waiting," Reub Levi answered, with a smile that did not look as self-satisfied as he tried to make it. "I'd a-had to do it myself, and now the other fellow's done it for me."

And thereafter he took Bill Turnbull's path just where it touched the corner of his own cleared land. But Malvina Dodd, to the day of her death, never once walked that way, but, going and coming, took the winding track that her husband had laid out for her when their home was built.

The next maker of the path was a boy not ten years old. His name was Philip Wessler, and he was a charity boy of German parentage, who had been adopted by an eccentric old man in the town, an herb-doctor. This calling was in more repute in those days than it is now. Old Doctor Van Wagener was growing feeble, and he relied on the boy, who was grateful and faithful, to search for his stock of simples. When the weather was favorable they would go together through the Ogden woods, and across the meadows to where the other woods began at the bottom of the hill. Here the old man would sit down and wait, while the boy climbed the steep hillside, and ranged hither and thither in his search for sassafras and liverwort, and a hundred and one plants, flowers, and herbs, in which the doctor found virtue. When he had collected his bundle he came running down the path to where the doctor sat, and left them for the old man to pick and choose from, while he darted off after another load.

He did a boy's work with the path. Steep grades were only a delight to him, and so in the course of a year or two he trod out, or jumped out, a series of break-neck short-cuts. William Turnbull--people called him William now, since he had built a clap-board house, and was using the log-cabin for a barn--William Turnbull, observing these short-cuts, approved of their purpose, but not of their method. He went through the woods once or twice on odd days after his hay was in, and did a little grading with a mattock. Here and there he made steps out of flat stones. He told his wife he thought it would be some handier for her, and she told him--they were both from Connecticut--that it was quite some handier, and that it was real thoughtful of him; and that she didn't want to speak no ill of the dead, but if her first man had been that considerate he wouldn't never have got himself drowned going pickerel fishing in March, when the ice was so soft you'd suppose rational folks would keep off of it.

This path was a path of slow formation. It was a path that was never destined to become a road. It is only in mathematics that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. The grade through the Jacobus woods was so steep that no wagon could have been hauled up it over the mud roads of that day and generation. Lumber, groceries, and all heavy truck were taken around by the road, that made a clean sweep around the hill, and was connected with the Dodd and Turnbull farms by a steep but short lane which the workmen had made when they built the Dodd house. The road was six miles to the path's three, but the drive was shorter than the walk.

There was a time when it looked as though the path might really develop into a road. That was the time when the township, having outgrown the county roads, began to build roads for itself. But, curiously enough, two subjects of Great Britain settled the fate of that New Jersey path. The controversy between Telford and Macadam was settled so long ago in Macadam's favor, that few remember the point of difference between those two noted engineers. Briefly stated, it was this: Mr. Telford said it was, and Mr. Macadam said it was not, necessary to put a foundation of large flat stones, set on end, under a broken-stone road. Reuben Levi's township, like many other New Jersey townships, sided with Mr. Telford, and made a mistake that cost thousands of dollars directly, and millions indirectly. To-day New Jersey can show the way to all her sister States in road-building and road-keeping. But the money she wasted on costly Telford pavements is only just beginning to come back to her, as she spreads out mile after mile of the economical Macadam. Reuben Levi's township squandered money on a few miles of Telford, raised the tax-rate higher than it had ever been before, and opened not one inch of new road for fifteen years thereafter. And within that fifteen years the canal came up on one side, opening a way to the great manufacturing town, ten miles down the river; and then the town at the end of the path was no longer the sole base of supplies. Then the railroad came around on the other side of the hill, and put a flag-station just at the bottom of what had come to be known as Dodd's Lane. And thus by the magic of nineteenth-century science New York and Newark were brought nearer to the hillside farm than the town three miles away.

But year by year new feet trod the path. The laborers who cut the canal found it and took it when they left their shanty camp to go to town for Saturday-night frolics. Then William Turnbull, who had enlarged his own farm as far as he found it paid, took to buying land and building houses in the valley beyond. Reub Levi laughed at him, but he prospered after a way he had, and built up a thriving little settlement just over the canal. The people of this little settlement soon made a path that connected with Reuben Levi's, by way of William Turnbull's, and whenever business or old association took them to town they helped to make the path longer and broader.

By and by the regular wayfarers found it out--the peddlers, the colporteurs, the wandering portrait-painters, the tinkers and clock-menders, the runaway apprentices, and all the rest of the old-time gentry of the road. And they carried the path on still farther--down the river to Newark.

It is not wholly to be told, "The Story of the Path." So many people had to do with its making in so many ways that no chronicle could tell all the meanings of its twists and turns and straight lines. There is one little jog in its course to-day, where it went around a tree, the stump of which rotted down into the ground a quarter of a century ago. Why do we walk around that useless bend to-day? Because it is a path, and because we walk in the way of human nature.

The life of a tree may be a hundred years or two hundred years and yet be long life. But the days of the age of a man are threescore and ten, and though some be so strong that they come to fourscore, yet the strong man may be stricken down in the flower of his strength, if it be the will of the Lord.

When William Turnbull came to die he was but twoscore years and five, but for all he was so young the people of the township gathered from far and near, for he had been a helpful man all his days, and those whom he had helped remembered that he would help them no more. Four men and four women sat up with the dead, twice as many as the old custom called for. One of the men was a Judge, two had been Chosen Freeholders, and the fourth was his hired man. There was no cemetery in the township, and his tomb had been built at the bottom of the hill, looking out on the meadows which he had just made his own--the last purchase of his life.

There were two other pall-bearers to carry him on their shoulders to the place beyond which no man goes. These two, when they left the house on the night before the funeral, walked slowly and thoughtfully down the path together. They looked over every step of the way with to-morrow's slow and toilsome march in their minds. When they came to the turn by Pelatiah's mound they paused.

"We can't never get him round that bend," said one. "That ain't no way to start down the hill. Best is I come here first thing in the morning and cut a way through this bull-brier straight across the angle, then we can see ahead where we're going. Put them two light men behind, and you and me at the head, and we can manage it. My! what a man he was, though! Why, I seen him take the head of a coffin all by himself once."

This man was a near neighbor of the Turnbulls, for now they had a number of neighbors; Reuben Levi Dodd had been selling small farms off his big farm--somehow he had never made the big farm a success. There are many services of men to man that country neighbors make little of, though to the dwellers in great cities they might seem strange burdens. At five o'clock the next morning Warren Freeman, the pall-bearer, went out and mowed and hacked a path through the tangled field from midway of old Pelatiah's trail down to a shortcut made by the doctor's charity boy, who was to-day a Judge. This Judge came out of the silent house, released by the waking hour, from his vigil with the dead. He watched his fellow pall-bearer at work.

"I used to go down that path on the dead run twenty years ago," said he, "when I was working for Dr. Van Wagener and he used to send me up here gathering herbs."

"You'll go down it on the dead walk to-morrow, Jedge," said the other, pausing in his work, "and you want to step mighty careful, or one fun'l will breed another."

Life, death, wedlock, the lingering of lovers, the waywardness of childish feet, the tread of weary toil, the slow, swaying walk of the mother, with her babe in her arms, the measured steps of the bearer of the dead, the light march of youth and strength and health--all, all have helped to beat out the strange, wandering line of the old path; and to me, who love to find and to tread its turns, the current of their human life flows still along its course, in the dim spaces under the trees, or out where the sunshine and the wind are at play upon the broad, bright meadows. _

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