post is installed.

But even with fair roads and regular coaching service, New England,
separated by her fixed topographical outlines, remains provincial. It is
not until the coming of the railroad, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, that the hills are overcome, and she ceases to be an
exclusively coastwise community and becomes an integral factor in the
economic development of the whole United States.

Thus, then, from a thin thread of a trail barely wide enough for one
moccasined foot to step before the other, to a broad, leveled
thoroughfare, so wide that three or even four automobiles may ride
abreast, and so clean that at the end of an all-day's journey one's
face is hardly dusty, does the history of the Old Coast Road unroll
itself. We who contemplate making the trip ensconced in the upholstered
comfort of a machine rolling on air-filled tires, will, perhaps, be less
petulant of some strip of roughened macadam, less bewildered by the
characteristic windings, if we recall something of the first
back-breaking cart that--not so very long ago--crashed over the stony
road, and toilsomely worked its way from devious lane to lane.

Before we start down the Old Coast Road it may be enlightening to get a
bird's-eye glimpse of it actually as we have historically, and for such
a glimpse there is no better place than on the topmost balcony of the
Soldier's Monument on Dorchester Heights. The trip to Dorchester
Heights, in South Boston, is, through whatever environs one approaches
it, far from attractive. This section of the city, endowed with
extraordinary natural beauty and advantage of both land and water, and
irrevocably and brilliantly graven upon the annals of American history,
has been allowed to lose its ancient prestige and to sink low indeed in
the social scale.

Nevertheless it is to Dorchester Heights that we, as travelers down the
Old Coast Road, and as skimmers over the quickly turning pages of our
early New England history, must go, and having once arrived at that
lovely green eminence, whitely pointed with a marble shaft of quite
unusual excellence, we must grieve once more that this truly glorious
spot, with its unparalleled view far down the many-islanded harbor to
the east and far over the famous city to the west, is not more
frequented, more enjoyed, more honored.

If you find your way up the hill, into the monument, and up the stairs
out to the balcony, probably you will encounter no other tour