206 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
When a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into 
its place, all natural forces seem to sympathize 
with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny. Once 
make a well-defined track through a wood, and 
presently the overflowing brooks seek it fora 
channel, the obstructed winds draw through it, 
the fox and woodchuck travel by it, the catbird 
and robin build near it, the bee and. swallow 
make a high-road of its convenient thorough- 
fare. In winter the first snows mark it with a 
white line ; as you wander through you hear the 
blue jay’s cry, and see the hurrying flight of 
the sparrow ; the graceful outlines of the leaf- 
less bushes are revealed, and the clinging bird’s 
nests, “leaves that do not fall,’ give happy 
memories of summer homes. Thus nature 
meets man half way. The paths of the wild 
forest and of the rural neighborhood are not at 
all the same thing; indeed, a “spotted trail,” 
marked only by the woodman’s axe-strokes on 
the trees, is not a footpath. Thoreau, who is 
sometimes foolishly accused of having sought 
to be a mere savage, understood this distinction 
well. “A man changes by his presence,” he 
says in his unpublished diary, “the very nature 
of the trees. The poet’s is not a logger’s path, 
but a woodman’s, — the logger and pioneer have 
preceded him, and banished decaying wood and 
the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built 
