114 The Ttimpike Road. 



that they should to us, we walk carelessly and unobserving. 

 The old red Turnpike road, even when tenanted by all of 

 fancy's picturings, is probably far less marvelous than any 

 single year of its truthful history which must remain 

 unknown. 



If we slop along the muddy road, we are apt to think 

 of it only as muddy, and not consider all that it means. 

 It is well to call vividly to mind how a particular reach 

 appears at different seasons; how it looks on a bright 

 June afternoon, a dark November day, when frozen as 

 hard as adamant in Winter, and when it lies in muddy 

 stretches. Plod, plod, have been the foot-steps along it 

 these many years, and the dust and the mud — perhaps this 

 same mud, mixed for the one hundredth winter — has be- 

 daubed many a pedestrian. When we think of this we 

 straightway fall to dreaming, and walk on truly historic 

 ground. 



The Indians Quervequeen, Aquepo, Sachemack and 

 their comrades, from whom Governor Lovelace purchased 

 the Island, once hunted where now runs the Turnpike 

 road. Little did they dream that the farmer's lumbering 

 wagon would slowly climb the hill-side, and meander along 

 where stood these almost insurmountable barriers of rocks 

 and trees, and little did they think either of the roisterly 

 laughter of the pic-nickers, and of those drunken and 

 hilarious shouts that are uttered by the savages of civili- 

 zation. 



A murderer buried his wife in the hollow, and nearby, 

 the cemetery bell often solemnly tolls with funeral sadness, 

 as the carriages leave the highway and approach the open 



