108 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Jan. 24, 1914. 
was in perfect repair nearly eight hundred years 
after, and still remains. It was built practically 
of solid rock, and with footpaths each side. 
The Romans built famous roads also in Brit¬ 
ain, and over the islands in the Mediterranean 
Sea. Those which were built among the Saxons 
remained long after the Roman rule had de¬ 
parted from their shores, but were allowed to go 
gradually into decay. It is said that in England, 
until so late as the time of Charles I., the com¬ 
mon roads were foot and bridle paths—no pro¬ 
vision being made for wheeled vehicles, for there 
were none. 
It seems somewhat curious that while the 
wheel and axle were utilized in chariots for pur¬ 
poses of war, from time immemorial, they should 
not sooner have played a more prominent part in 
the question of transportation and in traction. 
But the evolution in the early world which 
needed it had not come. 
Montaigne tells us of a road, which was a 
causeway as well, that was built in Peru, between 
Quito and Cuzco. It was three hundred leagues 
in extent, was paved and enclosed with high and 
beautiful walls, inside of which two clear rivu¬ 
lets ran, and was bordered with a beautiful sort 
of tree. It was cut through mountain and over 
valley, with of course, evenly-descending grade. 
No stones were used in the construction of it 
which were less than ten feet square, and all this 
work was done by a people who had no knowl¬ 
edge of machinery and appliances, and who made 
no use of scaffolding. To complete the marvel, 
luxurious places were provided for rest and re¬ 
freshment at the end of each day’s journey. This 
certainly savors of the early Munchausen, 
Mexican and Peruvian Chronicles, and may well 
be received, if at all, Cum grano salis. 
It is to be hoped that the workmen on the 
Panama Canal did not hear of that. 
Napoleon’s roads are among the notable 
things that deserved mention. “Louis XIV had 
said,” says Alison, “after the family compact was 
concluded, ‘There are no longer any Pyrenees’ 
but with greater reason Napoleon might say, 
‘There are no longer any Alps.’ ” And in an¬ 
other place he remarks: “The Alps, traversed 
by three splendid roads, ceased to present any 
obstacles to an invading army; and works, 
greater than the Roman emporers achieved in 
three centuries of their dominion in Italy, were 
completed by Napoleon in the first three years 
of his consular government.” To-day we do not 
level mountains or mitigate them, but, bore an 
aperture, pass through undisturbed and without 
perceptible grade, to the other side. 
It can be easily imagined that an observing 
person can never walk over the commonest coun¬ 
try highway, without thinking how much the 
road itself has to do with the landscape. It fur¬ 
nishes a sort of frame to every out-of-doors 
picture. On an articulated thread it holds the 
field and the hillside the cozy glen, the babbling 
rivulet, and the far-off mountain together. It 
somehow spreads itself over or drops itself down 
into the chaos and wildness of Nature, and 
brings them at once, not only into broader rela¬ 
tionship, but into a new spiritual order. In early 
boyhood, the beaten path which the road made 
past the house was always a special mystery to 
me. It stirred the imagination and set the blood 
in motion. The house stood, as it still stands, on 
a junction where three roads depart; and, from 
the little triangular greenery around which they 
clasp, the trefoil wonder looked up with appeal¬ 
ing significance. Those wheel-tracks and foot¬ 
marks of men and horses were incessantly re¬ 
peated and blurred out, and where might they not 
take you if you should once follow them? The 
possibilities were endless and tantalizing. 
Again quoting Thoreau: 
“If, with fancy unfurled, 
You leave your abode, 
You may go ’round the world 
By the Old Marlborough Road.” 
“The village,” he says, “is the place to which 
the roads tend,—a sort of expansion of the high¬ 
way, as a lake of the river. It is the body of 
which roads are the arms and legs a trivial or 
quadrival place, the thoroughfare and ordinary 
of travelers.” But Thoreau was himself too 
much of a Bedouin (though a moral and culti¬ 
vated one) to keep to the ordinary highway. He 
had villas of his own to which he carried his 
thoughts—(the only baggage he cared to equip 
with) villas that no public path ever reached. 
He confesses, in fact, that “roads are made for 
horses and the man of business.” 
Really, it is the magnitude and purport of 
the journey that give value to the road. Where 
the beaten one does not serve we can go “across 
lots” or beat a new one for the occasion. Not 
every one’s errand is ours. The sacredness of 
that which we seek may often take us where no 
previous foot or footway hath entered. 
It may easily be realized that road in all its 
ramified forms is the great nervous system of 
our complex civilization. 
Some writer has declared that to know the 
roads of a people is to know, in more than a 
single sense, what progress they have made or 
are making. 
In New England which represented the early 
and now shows the more complete culture of 
American rural life, our Puritan ancestors built 
the towns on broad streets, and offset the stingi¬ 
ness of the soil by liberal thoroughfares—as if 
they had some presentiment of the room which 
would be required here for so many jostling 
races of men. It is to our credit that the gen¬ 
eral character of the country roads, in nearly 
all quarters, is now very much superior to con¬ 
ditions of generations ago; and this, notwith¬ 
standing that steam and trolley roads have 
obviated long journeys by carriage or on horse¬ 
back. 
The exceptions are when we see the com¬ 
mon highways of our boyhood in a chronic state 
of neglect, the stones and boulders lying along 
the gravelly beds preaching eloquent sermons of 
the sloth and neglect and decadence. 
In the Western and Southern states, where 
the distances are long from place to place, and 
the soil lacks the material for a good road-bed, 
there were in the day of stages and other horse 
vehicles, adventurous experiences narrated. A 
passenger by one of the western stages, after pay¬ 
ing his fare, went on foot the entire way, and 
when the wheels sunk in below the hubs, helped 
to pry them out with a rail he was obliged to 
carry. “I don’t care a dura for the poor fare, 
but I do hate like thunder to carry that rail,” he 
protested. 
Another annalist tells us, with a sober gravi¬ 
ty that becomes the story, of picking up a hat on 
one of these execrably muddy roads, and finding, 
to his surprise, a man under it. On his proffer 
of help, the stranger politely thanked him, saying 
he was in no need of assistance as he was on 
horseback and hoped to pull through. That 
Western road which begins magnificently broad, 
and tapers first to moderate and then insignifi¬ 
cant dimensions, and finally ends in a squirrel 
track and runs up a tree, is the American sym¬ 
bol of a career which opens with large expecta¬ 
tions and ends in fruitlessness. Somewhere, but 
more likely in New England, a traveler is quoted 
who, on reaching a point where two roads sepa¬ 
rate, asks a neighboring citizen—as both serve 
for his journey—which one he shall take. The 
reply is, “Take either one, sir, and you will wish 
you had taken the other before you have gone 
half-way.” 
The road signifies travel, and travel means 
collision with various people and places, and 
consequent culture and knowledge of the world. 
But there are certain mystic thinkers of absorb¬ 
ing and fecundative mentality that would some¬ 
how be developed into their natural order if they 
were planted upon a rock. 
Thoreau once thought that nearly every¬ 
thing worth looking for lay under the Concord 
horizon, but this ardent faith found him many 
rare things and experiences which would never 
have come to less observant eyes. Plato in “The 
laws,” would not have any person under forty 
years of age go abroad at any time, unless he 
was commissioned by the state to go, or was en¬ 
gaged as a soldier in actual war. 
The picturesqueness of the road has been 
universally used to express exhalations of mental 
and spiritual conflict. 
“All roads lead to Rome,” says the proverb. 
There are many ways of pride and triumph— 
many a via dolorosa, hinting of the greatest and 
most pathetic tragedy in human history. Bun- 
yan’s immortal allegory derives its unsurpassable 
power from the adventures of a pilgrim, who 
passes over a road filled with difficulties and 
obstacles—a picture intended to portray the peri¬ 
lous evils and pitfalls that surround the tragedy 
of life. 
The abandoned road! What pathos is there 
in the breaking of old associations, old habits 
and the traditions: how true the picture drawn 
by T. Buchanan Read in his lines: 
“THE DESERTED ROAD.” 
“Ancient road, that windst deserted 
Through :he level of the vale, 
Sweeping toward the crowded market 
Like a stream without a sail; 
“Standing by thee, I look backward, 
And, as in the light of dreams, 
See the years descend and vanish 
Like thy whitely-tented teams. 
“Here I stroll along the village 
As in youth’s departed morn; 
But I miss the crowded coaches 
And the driver’s bugle-horn. 
* * * 
“Ancient highway, thou art vanquished; 
The usurper of the vale 
Rolls, in fiery, iron rattle, 
Exultations on the gale. 
“Thou are vanquished and neglected; 
But the good which thou hast done, 
Though by man it be forgotten, 
Shall be deathless as the sun, 
“Thou neglected, gray and grassy, 
Still I pray that my decline 
May be through as vernal valleys 
And as blessed a calm as thine.” 
