Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/81

Rh brush and thicket for the remainder. No stream was bridged, no hill was graded, and no marsh drained. The path led through woods which bore the marks of the centuries, over barren hills that had been licked by the Indian's hounds of fire, and along the banks of streams that the seine had never dragged A powerful interest was attached to the Bay Path. It was the channel through which laws were communicated, through which flowed news from distant friends, and through which came long, loving letters and messages That rough thread of soil, chopped by the blades of a hundred streams, was a bond that radiated at each terminus into a thousand fibres of love and interest, and hope and memory. Every rod had been prayed over, by friends on the journey and friends at home."

Alice Morse Earle also writes entertainingly of the Bay Path:

"Born in a home almost by the wayside of the old Bay Path, I feel deeply the inexplicable charm which attaches itself to these old paths or trails. I have ridden