XLVIII. WINDING ROADS 
“O, down the valley do they go, where all is sweet and still, 
To gently wind and turn about and hide behind the hill. 
They are not as the city’s streets; they have no clash and roar 
But high and wide above them do the songbirds wheel and soar; 
And bordering their sides are vines, that spill their wealth of bloom 
Through which the sunshine spatters like jewels in the gloom. 
Where do they go? the little roads that find the hidden ways, 
As memories that ramble down through misty yesterdays.”’ 
—Wilbur D. Nesbit (The Winding Roads). 
This is our last field trip together. Let us betake ourselves 
to some little winding roadway that has escaped the “march 
of progress.” No fine highway for us today; no boulevard, 
graded like a speedway, raw in its newness, full of dust and 
din, or stinking withoil. No, let it be a little unimproved 
roadway winding among the hills; a roadway with a past, 
and with no concern about the future, settled, peaceful, 
redolent with the fragrance of bordering woods and fields; 
a roadway circling the hills and not demanding their removal; 
a roadway with the scars of its ancient struggle for existence 
all healed; its embankments hidden by graceful drapery of 
verdure let down over them from the bordering woods. 
And, if it be a dusty roadway, may the dust be clean and cool, 
dappled with the shadows of pleasant trees or pitted with the 
fall of the great drops of the summer rain, or printed with 
the feet of men or animals, or with the wheels of lazy 
vehicles. 
If such it be, we shall see few people passing, but we may 
see other inhabitants: for the bushes by such a roadside are 
full of birds, and rabbits and gophers sit nibbling at the way- 
side clovers. The signs of other passers-by will not be lack- 
ing. A sinuous trail through the dust may show where a 
garter snake crossed the road; the streaks radiating from a 
“chuck-hole” in a rut may show where a grouse took a dust- 
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