T Across Lots is Best HERE are two ways of going from one place to another, sometimes more, but always two; you may either take the highroad or go across lots. By the highroad one gets there quicker, as a rule, for several reasons, as because it actually is a road, with the impediments to travel removed, the streams bridged, the way marked out so that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein. Also one finds less that distracts the attention; his task is laid out before him by the surveyors and the civil engineers, or at least by the selectmen, assessors and overseers of the poor-for in truth some roads do not appear to have had any surveying or engineering, but to have been made the way the little girl's mother cut her waists-" by presume." It is true that out in the country, there are many of these highways which are really most attractive and tempting to divagation, being so winding, wilful and hid away that they seem only temporarily diverted from the original cowpath or wood-road. Yet at the best a road is a road, and the instinct of conformity is such in us that once started on it, we follow it faithfully. Wagon tracks or sleigh tracks, 'tis much the same. It gets monotonous, but one has the ever precious sense that one is going to a definite goal. We take a prospect or two by the way, but after all, there is a certain impression of business about a highway. And so if one is not bound on any business, on a brisk but cheery winter morning, even though he may mean to climb a mountain before the day is done, there are odds in favour of the 'cross-lots plan. It is not so easy for the muscles, but it is more interesting for the nerves. There is a certain triumph in trampling on difficulties, such as the drifts on a rocky hillside and the overankle snow in the woods. It is a jolly thing to leap from tussock to tussock in the warm-watered marsh, or even to hang on to an old-fashioned rail fence while one treads tentatively on what may be solid ground and may be a deceptive coating over ice as thin as isinglass. There is excitement in plunging through a thicket of birches and alders and osiers, plentifully accompanied with blackberry brier and complicated by bittersweet vines and wild grapes. How stupid is a bridge, when you come to a brook and look for the likeliest spot for a leap!—a leap is freedom, while a bridge |