They were traced with the unerring instinct of the woodsman to the points they connected, even though the trail wound around hillsides, digressed to avoid bogs, rivers, and tidal inlets, bent to meet the natural crossings of streams, turned around rocks and fallen trees, coming always again to the general line of their course, just as the railroad of today is planned on a larger scale, and by the aid of modern invention, survey, and study.

So it becomes an interesting and instructive thought, as we travel along the regraded thoroughfare, or race over its surface in a roaring train of cars, that beneath its hard, asphalted surface, below the remains of its macadamized predecessor, perhaps under the corduroy logs of an earlier cartway, there may yet be traces of the beaten surface of the narrow footway, hardened by the soft footfalls of the moccasined feet of the Mahican during centuries of travel, long before civilization burst its bounds in overcrowded Europe and set forth to seize the home-land of the Indian.

The origin of the path is lost in the haze of uncertainty regarding the anterior history of the American Indian.