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He had that sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards. He was not a man to be taken in by names.
True it is that no other plain is so well supplied with guideboards. At every turn and crossing you find them, and upon each one is written the exact direction and distance. One great trouble is, however, that these boards are all different, and the result is that most travelers are confused in proportion to the number they read.
The Cape has informative guide boards, though whether the facts match the information I am not quite so sure. Perhaps, sailor-like, I was circumnavigating Cotuit, beating in, as one might say, instead of sailing directly to port, for I found three guideboards at intervals of a mile or two and each announced with monotonous regularity that it was two and a half miles to Cotuit.
Thousands of people are around each of these signs, and each one is doing his best to convince the traveler that his particular board is the only one upon which the least reliance can be placed, and that if his road is taken the reward for so doing will be infinite and eternal, while all the other roads are said to lead to hell, and all the makers of the other guideboards are declared to be heretics, hypocrites, and liars.
When it comes to making statements the Cape guideboards stand loyally by one another. But the little town hove above the horizon at last with its lovely blue bay of warm Gulf-stream water, set in a sweet curve of white sand and backed by neat cottages bowered in green trees. It is worth walking across the Cape to reach Cotuit at the journey's end, but I doubt the eight miles.
Instead of going "to town," the farmers of the remote school districts talk of going "to the Green," to meeting and to market; and in all that region the guideboards point the way "To BELFIELD GREEN." This spot was the site of the old blockhouse and stockaded fort, within whose rude but safe defences the early colonists of Belfield, with their wives, children, and cattle, used to huddle at night, through all the time of King Philip's War.
The following were decided on, each item being voted on separately: For highway repairs $3,800 For military aid $500 For removing snow 300 For guideboards 50 For fire department 1,200 For abatement of taxes and For police service 500 collector's fee 500 For night watch 600 For support of poor 5,500 For town officers 2,200 For library, etc 1,000 For town committees, and For schools, proper 11,300 Abingdon records 50 For school-incidentals 1,000 For miscellaneous expenses 1,200 For school books 1,000 For interest 1,000 For hydrants 2,300 For memorial day 100 For water bonds, etc 2,500
Boone, the county seat of Watauga County, was our destination, and, ever since morning, the guideboards and the trend of the roads had notified us that everything in this region tends towards Boone as a center of interest. The simple ingenuity of some of the guide-boards impressed us. If, on coming to a fork, the traveler was to turn to the right, the sign read,
We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm.
Boone, the county seat of Watauga County, was our destination, and, ever since morning, the guideboards and the trend of the roads had notified us that everything in this region tends towards Boone as a center of interest. The simple ingenuity of some of the guide-boards impressed us. If, on coming to a fork, the traveler was to turn to the right, the sign read,
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