ath is the most human thing in inanimate nature. Even as the
print of his thumb reveals the old offender to the detectives, so the
path tells you the sort of feet that wore it. Like the human nature that
created it, it starts out to go straight when strength and determination
shape its course, and it goes crooked when weakness lays it out. Until
you begin to study them you can have no notion of the differences of
character that exist among foot-paths. One line of trodden earth seems
to you the same as another. But look! Is the path you are walking on
fairly straight from point to point, yet deflected to avoid short rises
and falls, _and is it worn to grade_? That is, does it plough a deep way
through little humps and hillocks something as a street is cut down to
grade? If you see this path before you, you maybe sure that it is made
by the heavy shuffle of workingmen's feet. A path that wavers from side
to side, especially if the turns be from one bush to another, and that
is only a light trail making an even line of wear over the inequalities
of the ground--that is a path that children make. The path made by the
business man--the man who is anxious to get to his work at one end of
the day, and anxious to get to his home at the other--is generally a
good piece of engineering. This type of man makes more paths in this
country than he does in any other. He carries his intelligence and his
energy into every act of life, and even in the half-unconscious business
of making his own private trail he generally manages to find the line of
least resistance in getting from one given point to another.

This is the story of a path:

It is called Reub Levi's Path, because Reuben Levi Dodd is supposed to
have made it, some time in 1830 or thereabout, when he built his house
on the hill. But it is much older than Reuben Levi. He probably thought
he was telling the truth when, forty years ago, he swore to having
broken the path himself twenty years before, through the Jacobus woods,
down the hill and across the flat lands that then belonged to the
Onderdoncks, and again through the Ogden woods to the county road; but
he forgot that on the bright June day when he first started to find a
convenient way through the woods and over the broad lowland fields from
his own front-door to that of his father-in-law, Evert Ogden, and then
through Mr. Ogden's patch of woods to the little town on the bank of the
Passaic--he forgot that for a little par