OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS 7 



gentle, untrammelled way, hither and yon, here 

 beset by heavy forest growth, there a tangle of 

 greenbrier and scrub oaks, losing you often, pick- 

 ing you up again when you least expect it, but 

 always leading you off the humdrum highway of 

 today into the gentle wildernesses of old time ro- 

 mance. You find them margined with marks of 

 the pioneer. It may be just a hollow which was 

 once his tiny cellar-hole or a rectangular mound 

 where the logs of his cabin tumbled into the 

 mould, perhaps a moss-grown, weatherbeaten 

 house itself with its barberry bush or its lilac 

 still holding firmly where the pioneer house- 

 holder set it. These old trails of the Plymouth 

 woods may be just of one family's making, lead- 

 ing from house to pasture and woodlot, or 

 they may be bits of an old-time footpath way 

 first worked out by the Indians themselves 

 no one knows how many centuries ago. Find 

 me an eskar in Plymouth county, a "hog- 

 back ridge" as our forbears were wont to 

 call it, and the chances are fair that along its 

 narrow summit edge I'll show you an Indian 

 trail. Sometimes the Pilgrim paths adopted 

 these and later made them roadways. 



As you go southward in this region you find 



