st of
houses, the path suggests school-children with their luncheon-baskets,
or workmen seeking eagerly the noonday interval or the twilight rest. A
footpath cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains such; you can
make a road a mere avenue for fast horses or showy women, but this
humbler track keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking
through it, she comes but as a village maid. On Sunday, when it is not
etiquette for our fashionables to drive, but only to walk along the
cliffs, they seem to wear a more innocent and wholesome aspect in that
novel position; I have seen a fine lady pause under such circumstances
and pick a wild-flower; she knew how to do it. A footpath has its own
character, while that of the high-road is imposed upon it by those who
dwell beside it or pass over it; indeed, roads become picturesque only
when they are called lanes and make believe that they are but paths.

The very irregularity of a footpath makes half its charm. So much of
loitering and indolence and impulse have gone to its formation, that
all which is stiff and military has been left out. I observed that the
very dikes of the Southern rice plantations did not succeed in being
rectilinear, though the general effect was that of Tennyson's "flowery
squares." Even the country road, which is but an enlarged footpath, is
never quite straight, as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with
his surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary: "The law that
plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and that
curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight
fences and highways of men, and makes them conform to the line of
beauty at last." It is this unintentional adaptation that makes a
footpath so indestructible. Instead of striking across the natural
lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the hollow, skirts the
precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious landscape-gardener, it
seeks the most convenient course, never doubting that grace will
follow. Mitchell, at his "Edgewood" farm, wishing to decide on the most
picturesque avenue to his front door, ordered a heavy load of stone to
be hauled across the field, and bade the driver seek the easiest
grades, at whatever cost of curvature. The avenue followed the path so
made.

When a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into its place, all natural
forces seem to sympathize with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny.
Once make a well-defined track t