wn for
Saturday-night frolics. Then William Turnbull, who had enlarged his own
farm as far as he found it paid, took to buying land and building houses
in the valley beyond. Reub Levi laughed at him, but he prospered after a
way he had, and built up a thriving little settlement just over the
canal. The people of this little settlement soon made a path that
connected with Reuben Levi's, by way of William Turnbull's, and whenever
business or old association took them to town they helped to make the
path longer and broader.

[Illustration: "THE LABORERS ... FOUND IT AND TOOK IT"]

By and by the regular wayfarers found it out--the peddlers, the
colporteurs, the wandering portrait-painters, the tinkers and
clock-menders, the runaway apprentices, and all the rest of the old-time
gentry of the road. And they carried the path on still farther--down the
river to Newark.

It is not wholly to be told, "The Story of the Path." So many people had
to do with its making in so many ways that no chronicle could tell all
the meanings of its twists and turns and straight lines. There is one
little jog in its course to-day, where it went around a tree, the stump
of which rotted down into the ground a quarter of a century ago. Why do
we walk around that useless bend to-day? Because it is a path, and
because we walk in the way of human nature.

The life of a tree may be a hundred years or two hundred years and yet
be long life. But the days of the age of a man are threescore and ten,
and though some be so strong that they come to fourscore, yet the strong
man may be stricken down in the flower of his strength, if it be the
will of the Lord.

[Illustration]

When William Turnbull came to die he was but twoscore years and five,
but for all he was so young the people of the township gathered from far
and near, for he had been a helpful man all his days, and those whom he
had helped remembered that he would help them no more. Four men and
four women sat up with the dead, twice as many as the old custom called
for. One of the men was a Judge, two had been Chosen Freeholders, and
the fourth was his hired man. There was no cemetery in the township, and
his tomb had been built at the bottom of the hill, looking out on the
meadows which he had just made his own--the last purchase of his life.

There were two other pall-bearers to carry him on their shoulders to the
place beyond which no man goes. These two, when they left the house on
the ni