he curving and indented
line of the sea, and dotted here and there with fishing hamlets. This
whole interior is traversed by a network of footpaths, rarely passable
for a wagon, and not always for a horse, but enabling the pedestrian to
go from any one of these villages to any other, in a line almost
direct, and always under an agreeable shade. By the longest of these
hidden ways, one may go from Pigeon Cove to Gloucester, ten miles,
without seeing a public road. In the little inn at the former village
there used to hang an old map of this whole forest region, giving a
chart of some of these paths, which were said to date back to the first
settlement of the country. One of them, for instance, was called on the
map "Old Road from Sandy Bay to Squam Meeting-house through the Woods";
but the road is now scarcely even a bridle-path, and the most faithful
worshipper could not seek Squam Meeting-house in the family chaise.
Those woods have been lately devastated; but when I first knew that
region, it was as good as any German forest.

Often we stepped almost from the edge of the sea into some gap in the
woods; there seemed hardly more than a rabbit-track, yet presently we
met some wayfarer who had crossed the Cape by it. A piny dell gave some
vista of the broad sea we were leaving, and an opening in the woods
displayed another blue sea-line before; the encountering breezes
interchanged odor of berry-bush and scent of brine; penetrating farther
among oaks and chestnuts, we came upon some little cottage, quaint and
sheltered as any Spenser drew; it was built on no high-road, and turned
its vine-clad gable away from even the footpath.

Then the ground rose and we were surprised by a breeze from a new
quarter; perhaps we climbed trees to look for landmarks, and saw only,
still farther in the woods, some great cliff of granite or the derrick
of an unseen quarry. Three miles inland, as I remember, we found the
hearthstones of a vanished settlement; then we passed a swamp with
cardinal-flowers; then a cathedral of noble pines, topped with
crow's-nests. If we had not gone astray by this time, we presently
emerged on Dogtown Common, an elevated table-land, over-spread with
great boulders as with houses, and encircled with a girdle of green
woods and an outer girdle of blue sea. I know of nothing more wild than
that gray waste of boulders; it is a natural Salisbury Plain, of which
icebergs and ocean-currents were the Druidic builders;