oad. It is only in mathematics that a straight
line is the shortest distance between two points. The grade through the
Jacobus woods was so steep that no wagon could have been hauled up it
over the mud roads of that day and generation. Lumber, groceries, and
all heavy truck were taken around by the road, that made a clean sweep
around the hill, and was connected with the Dodd and Turnbull farms by a
steep but short lane which the workmen had made when they built the Dodd
house. The road was six miles to the path's three, but the drive was
shorter than the walk.

There was a time when it looked as though the path might really develop
into a road. That was the time when the township, having outgrown the
county roads, began to build roads for itself. But, curiously enough,
two subjects of Great Britain settled the fate of that New Jersey path.
The controversy between Telford and Macadam was settled so long ago in
Macadam's favor, that few remember the point of difference between those
two noted engineers. Briefly stated, it was this: Mr. Telford said it
_was_, and Mr. Macadam said it was _not_, necessary to put a foundation
of large flat stones, set on end, under a broken-stone road. Reuben
Levi's township, like many other New Jersey townships, sided with Mr.
Telford, and made a mistake that cost thousands of dollars directly, and
millions indirectly. To-day New Jersey can show the way to all her
sister States in road-building and road-keeping. But the money she
wasted on costly Telford pavements is only just beginning to come back
to her, as she spreads out mile after mile of the economical Macadam.
Reuben Levi's township squandered money on a few miles of Telford,
raised the tax-rate higher than it had ever been before, and opened not
one inch of new road for fifteen years thereafter. And within that
fifteen years the canal came up on one side, opening a way to the great
manufacturing town, ten miles down the river; and then the town at the
end of the path was no longer the sole base of supplies. Then the
railroad came around on the other side of the hill, and put a
flag-station just at the bottom of what had come to be known as Dodd's
Lane. And thus by the magic of nineteenth-century science New York and
Newark were brought nearer to the hillside farm than the town three
miles away.

But year by year new feet trod the path. The laborers who cut the canal
found it and took it when they left their shanty camp to go to to