rns up a little by-path leading from it to a cottage that no industry
or thrift will make his own; and for him to aspire to a roadway to his
front-door would be a gross piece of impertinence in a man of his
station. It is the remembrance of just such right-of-way foot-paths as
the English lady's sad heart yearned after that reconciles me to a great
many hundreds of houses that have recently been built in the State of
New Jersey after designs out of books that cost all the way from
twenty-five cents to a dollar. Architecturally these are very much
inferior to the English cottager's home, and they occasionally waken
thoughts of incendiarism. But the people who live in them are people who
insist on having roads right to their front-doors, and I have heard
them do some mighty interesting talking in town-meeting about the way
those roads shall be laid and who shall do the laying.

As I have before remarked, I am quite willing to believe that Holyoke is
a pathless wilderness, in the English lady's sense. But when Mr.
Burroughs makes the generalization that there are no foot-paths in this
country, it seems to me he must be letting his boyhood get too far away
from him.

For there are foot-paths enough, certainly. Of course an old foot-path
in this country always serves to mark the line of a new road when the
people who had worn it take to keeping horses. But there are thousands
of miles of paths criss-crossing the countryside in all of our older
States that will never see the dirt-cart or the stone-crusher in the
lifetime of any man alive to-day.

[Illustration: "THROUGH THE RICH MAN'S COUNTRY"]

Mr. Burroughs--especially when he is published in the dainty little
Douglas duodecimos--is one of the authors whose books a busy man
reserves for a pocket-luxury of travel. So it was that, a belated
reader, I came across his lament over our pathlessness, some years
after my having had a hand--or a foot, as you might say--in the making
of a certain cross-lots foot-way which led me to study the windings and
turnings of the longer countryside walks until I got the idea of writing
"The Story of a Path." I am sorry to contradict Mr. Burroughs, but, if
there are no foot-paths in America, what becomes of the many good golden
hours that I have spent in well-tracked woodland ways and in narrow
foot-lanes through the wind-swept meadow grass? I cannot give these up;
I can only wish that Mr. Burroughs had been my companion in them.

A foot-p