(they to whom the idea of road-building was original) will be recognized
as significant as the quiver of the wings of the first airplane.

Let us follow the old road from Boston to Plymouth: follow it, not with
undue exactitude, and rather too hastily, as is the modern way, but
comfortably, as is also the modern way, picking up what bits of quaint
lore and half-forgotten history we most easily may.

I think that as we start down this historic highway, we shall
encounter--if our mood be the proper one in which to undertake such a
journey--a curious procession coming down the years to meet us. We shall
not call them ghosts, for they are not phantoms severed from earth, but,
rather, the permanent possessors of the highway which they helped
create.

We shall meet the Indian first, running lightly on straight, moccasined
feet, along the trail from which he has burned, from time to time, the
underbrush. He does not go by land when he can go by water, but in this
case there are both land and water to meet, for many are the streams,
and they are unbridged as yet. With rhythmic lope, more beautiful than
the stride of any civilized limbs, and with a sure divination of the
best route, he chooses the trail which will ultimately be the highway of
the vast army of pale-faces. Speed on, O solitary Indian--to vanish down
the narrow trail of your treading as you are destined, in time, to
vanish forever from the vision of New England!... Behind the red runner
plod two stern-faced Pilgrims, pushing their way up from Plymouth toward
the newer settlement at Massachusetts Bay. They come slowly and
laboriously on foot, their guns cocked, eyes and ears alert, wading the
streams without complaint or comment. They keep together, for no one is
allowed to travel over this Old Coast Road single, "nor without some
arms, though two or three together." The path they take follows almost
exactly the trail of the Indian, seeking the fords, avoiding the
morasses, clinging to the uplands, and skirting the rough, wooded
heights.... After them--almost a decade after--we see a man on
horseback, with his wife on a pillion behind him. They carry their own
provisions and those for the beast, now and then dismounting to lead the
horse over difficult ground, and now and then blazing a tree to help
them in their return journey--mute testimony to the cruder senses of the
white man to whom woodcraft never becomes instinctive. The fact that
this couple possesses a h