Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 4).djvu/209

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IN HISTORY
205

journeyed to and fro in that valley visiting the classic spots which appear in such tender grace in the glad sunshine of a mountain autumn, I never passed a spot of open where this old roadway was to be seen without a thrill; as James Lane Allen has so beautifully said of Boone's old road through Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, so may the explorer feelingly exclaim concerning Braddock's old track: "It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a tribute."

This is particularly true of Braddock's Road when you find it in the forests; everything that savage mark tells in the open country is reëchoed in mightier tones within the shadows of the woods. There the wide strange track is like nothing of which you ever heard or read. It looks nothing like a roadway. It is plainly not the track of a tornado, though its width and straight course in certain places would suggest this. Yet it is never the same in two places; here, it is a wide straight aisle covered with rank weeds in the center of the low, wet course; there, the forests impinge upon it where the ground is drier;