uthern fire-flies offered their floating
lanterns for guidance, and the hoarse "Chuck-will's-widow" croaked
ominously from the trees, and the great guns of the siege of Charleston
throbbed more faintly than the drumming of a partridge, far away. Those
islands are everywhere so intersected by dikes and ledges and winding
creeks as to form a natural military region, like La Vendee and yet two
plantations that are twenty miles asunder by the road will sometimes be
united by a footpath which a negro can traverse in two hours. These
tracks are limited in distance by the island formation, but they assume
a greater importance as you penetrate the mainland; they then join
great States instead of mere plantations, and if you ask whither one of
them leads, you are told "To Alabama," or "To Tennessee."

Time would fail to tell of that wandering path which leads to the Mine
Mountain near Brattleborough, where you climb the high peak at last,
and perhaps see the showers come up the Connecticut till they patter on
the leaves beneath you, and then, swerving, pass up the black ravine
and leave you unwet. Or of those among the White Mountains, gorgeous
with great red lilies which presently seem to take flight in a cloud of
butterflies that match their tints,--paths where the balsamic air
caresses you in light breezes, and masses of alder-berries rise above
the waving ferns. Or of the paths that lead beside many a little New
England stream, whose bank is lost to sight in a smooth green slope of
grape-vine: the lower shoots rest upon the quiet water, but the upper
masses are crowned by a white wreath of alder-blooms; beside them grow
great masses of wild-roses, and the simultaneous blossoms and berries
of the gaudy nightshade. Or of those winding tracks that lead here and
there among the flat stones of peaceful old graveyards, so entwined
with grass and flowers that every spray of sweetbrier seems to tell
more of life than all the accumulated epitaphs can tell of death.

And when the paths that one has personally traversed are exhausted,
memory holds almost as clearly those which the poets have trodden for
us,--those innumerable by-ways of Shakespeare, each more real than any
high-road in England; or Chaucer's

"Little path I found
Of mintes full and fennell greene";

or Spenser's

"Pathes and alleies wide
With footing worne";

or the path of Browning's "Pippa"

"Down the hillside, up the glen,