ntical roadway.

And yet, as I told Alice, this roadway was actually the most natural
feature of the place; there was absolutely no touch of artificiality
about it; it was originally a stretch of sand, and such it had remained
from time immemorial, by which I mean from that remote date--presumably
eighteen centuries ago--when the receding waters of Lake Michigan left
the spot subsequently to be known as the old Schmittheimer place high
and dry in section 5, range 16, township 3. The genius of man had
wrought wondrous and beautiful changes elsewhere, converting marshes
into boulevards and transforming sandy wastes into blooming gardens;
but never had it expended a touch or a thought upon that bald
prehistoric streak which served as a driveway for all vehicles that
dared invade the old Schmittheimer place.

How many vehicles had in the lapse of years been hopelessly maimed or
totally wrecked while trying to traverse that roadway I shall not
presume to say, for as a man of science I glory in exactness and I
eschew surmise. This much I know, for I have seen it time and again
during the last four months: nothing that moves on wheels has ventured
upon that roadway that it did not sink slowly but surely up to the hubs
of its wheels in the unresisting sand. The Pusheck grocery cart broke
a spring the first time it drove in, and the wagon that hauled the
steam fixtures was stalled for three hours in one of those treacherous
depressions in which the roadway abounds, depressions which, as I am
told, are known to dwellers in hilly country places as "thank-ye-marms."

Until I became acquainted with this particular roadway I never fully
comprehended the nicety and the force of the phrase "to drive in." I
had heard people say that they had driven into such and such places,
and I had wondered why they employed this figure of speech when, it
seemed to me, it would have been more exact to say that they entered
upon or drove over. But I know now that it is no figure of speech when
one says that he drives into the old Schmittheimer place. No other
phrase could more exactly express an actuality.

If we were going to retain the driveway in all its unhampered
prehistoric simplicity, just as the glacial period found and left it,
it would really be the proper thing for us to found and to maintain a
rescue station in its vicinity, for we have been called upon to hasten
to the relief of every vehicle that has "driven into" the premises