arful to the imaginative in the insistence of it.
You may camp, you may linger, but some time or another, sooner or
later, you must go on, and when you do, then once again the Trail takes
up its continuity without reference to the muddied place you have
tramped out in your indecision or indolence or obstinacy or necessity.
It would be exceedingly curious to follow out in patience the chart of
a man's going, tracing the pattern of his steps with all its windings
of nursery, playground, boys afield, country, city, plain, forest,
mountain, wilderness, home, always on and on into the higher country of
responsibility until at the last it leaves us at the summit of the
Great Divide. Such a pattern would tell his story as surely as do the
tracks of a partridge on the snow.

A certain magic inheres in the very name, or at least so it seems to
me. I should be interested to know whether others feel the same
glamour that I do in the contemplation of such syllables as the Lo-Lo
Trail, the Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright Angel Trail. A
certain elasticity of application too leaves room for the more
connotation. A trail may be almost anything. There are wagon-trails
which East would rank as macadam roads; horse-trails that would compare
favorably with our best bridle-paths; foot-trails in the fur country
worn by constant use as smooth as so many garden-walks. Then again
there are other arrangements. I have heard a mule-driver overwhelmed
with skeptical derision because he claimed to have upset but six times
in traversing a certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in
charts of the mountains are marked many trails which are only "ways
through,"--you will find few traces of predecessors; the same can be
said of trails in the great forests where even an Indian is sometimes
at fault. "Johnny, you're lost," accused the white man. "Trail lost:
Injun here," denied the red man. And so after your experience has led
you by the campfires of a thousand delights, and each of those
campfires is on the Trail, which only pauses courteously for your stay
and then leads on untiring into new mysteries forever and ever, you
come to love it as the donor of great joys. You too become a
Westerner, and when somebody says "trail," your eye too lights up.

The general impression of any particular trail is born rather of the
little incidents than of the big accidents. The latter are exotic, and
might belong to any time or places; the