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Here, again, Bostonians should be at home, for the streets grew no doubt from cow-paths winding leisurely from house to pasture, and down them at night, even now, some of them, the cows stray and nibble on the homeward way. I fancy no town so individual in its characteristics still remains in the State. The very pavements smack of it.

Here then the poet walked through the narrow streets winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be irregular and vacillating.

Then cane the raw days of late October, when the crows went flying southward before the wind a noisy pirate fleet that filled the sky at times and when we all put on our mittens and went down the winding cow-paths to the grove of butternuts in the pasture. The great roof of the wilderness had turned red and faded into yellow.

It will not explain why to Jimmie, from Tarrytown to Port Chester, the hills, the roads, the woods, and the cow-paths, caves, streams, and springs hidden in the woods were as familiar as his own kitchen garden, nor explain why, when you could not see a Pease and Elliman "For Sale" sign nailed to a tree, Jimmie could see in the highest branches a last year's bird's nest.

There was no water in that place and the gang grumbled badly; but it was not long before the reason of his choice was fairly obvious. Tracks across the desert have a way of curving from point to point, no more following a straight course than the cow-paths do in other lands.

They learned all the trails and cow-paths; but nothing delighted them more than to essay the roughest and most impossible rides, where they were glad to crouch and crawl along the narrowest deer-runs, Bob and Mab struggling and forcing their way along behind. Back from their rides they brought the seeds and bulbs of wild flowers to plant in favoring nooks on the ranch.

His wanderings had carried him through dark, winding cow-paths and lanes to within a stone's throw of Jack Trentman's shanty, standing alone like the pariah it was, on the steep bank of the river near the ferry. Back in a clump of sugar trees it seemed to hide, as if shrinking from the accusing eye of every good and honest man.

But in so doing I became so often involved in the maze of cross-roads, bylanes, cow-paths, and cart-tracks, that twice the dawn found me as completely lost as though I had been set down in the midst of the Sahara.

It was covered in those days with a network of mysteriously winding cow-paths leading from shadow into sunshine, from dark groves through underbrush and berry-bushes to bubbling brooks. Many a thrilling adventure did I pursue with my brothers through those alluring paths, never knowing what treasure or surprise lay around the next curve.

The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples. Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith.