fe). After the first cart-track is
made to carry the boards and shingles in, a better road will be needed
to haul firewood and grain out (for the wants of the new family have
increased, and things must be bought in the neighboring village with
money, and money can only be had by selling the products of the farm).
By and by the neighborhood is so well inhabited that it is to the
advantage of the villages all around it to have good and safe and easy
roads there; and the road is declared a public one, and it is
regularly kept in repair and improved at the public expense. Do not
forget the squirrels of long ago. They were the projectors of this
road. Their successors use it now,--men and squirrels alike,--and stop
at the spring to drink, and under the huge oaks to rest.

A few years more, and it becomes to the advantage of all to have a
railway through the valley and over the hillside. Then a young
surveyor, just graduated from college, comes with his chain-men and
flag-men, and finds that the squirrels, and bears, and hunters, and
all the rest have picked out the easiest way for him long centuries
ago. He makes his map, and soon the chief enigneer and the president
of the road drive along in a buggy with a pair of fast horses
(frightening the little squirrels off their road-way and into their
holes), and the route of the Bear Valley and Quercus Railway is
finally selected, and here it is. See! there comes a train along the
track. This is the way a railway route grew out of a squirrel path.
There are thousands of little steps, but you can trace them, or
imagine them, as well as I can tell you.

It is the same all over the world. Stanley cut a track through the
endless African forests. But it lay between the Pygmy villages, along
the paths they had made, and through the glades where they fought
their battles with the storks.

Sometimes the first road is a river--the track is already cut. Try to
find out where the settlements in America were in the very early
days--before 1800. You will find them along the Hudson, the Juanita,
the St. Lawrence, the James, the Mississippi Rivers. But when these
are left, men follow the squirrel-tracks and bear-tracks, or the
paths of hunters, or the roads of Roman soldiers. It is a standing
puzzle to little children why all the great rivers flow past the great
towns. (Why do they?) The answer to that question will tell you why
the great battles are fought in the same regions; why Egypt has