It was a strange coincidence. A farmer living near by employed an Indian from the school at Carlisle, and now that the work of the summer was over, this taciturn youth walked daily over a hill to a school-house more than a mile away, and the path leading to it was an Indian trail.

Not long since I met the lad on this very path returning from school, and when he passed I stood by an old oak and watched him until lost among the trees, walking where centuries ago his people had walked when going from the mountain village and rock shelters along an inland creek to the distant town by the river.

As you looked about from the old oak there was no public road or house in sight; nothing but trees and bushes, huge rocks, and one curious jutting ledge that tradition holds is a 148veritable relic of prehistoric time,—a place where council fires were lit and midnight meetings held.

Whether tradition is true or not, the place was a fitting one whereat to tarry and fall a-thinking. Happy, indeed, could the old oak have spoken.

Many a public road of recent date has been built on the line of an old trail, as many a town and even city have replaced Indian villages; but take the long-settled regions generally, the ancient landmarks are all gone, and a stray potsherd or flint arrow-point in the fields is all that is left to recall the days of the dusky aborigines.

Only in the rough, rocky, irreclaimable hills are we likely now to be successful, if such traces as a trail are sought for.

It was so here. Bald-top Hill is of little use to the white man except for the firewood that grows upon its sides and the scattered game that still linger in its thickets. As seen from the nearest road, not far off, there is nothing now to suggest that an Indian ever clambered about it. The undergrowth hides every trace of the surface; but after the leaves drop and a light snow has fallen, a curious 149white line can be traced from the base of the summit; this is the old trail.

It is a narrow path, but for so long a time had it been used by the Indians that, when once pointed out, it can still be followed without difficulty. It leads now from one little intervale to another: from farmer A to farmer B; but originally it was part of their long highway leading from Philadelphia to Easton, perhaps. It matters not. Enough to know that then, as now, there were towns almost wherever there was land fit for dwellings, and paths that led from one to the other. It is clear that the Indians knew the whole country well. The routes they finally chose resulted from long experience, and were as direct as the nature of the ground made possible.

The study of trails opens up to us a broader view of ancient Indian life than we are apt to entertain.

We find the sites of villages on the banks of the rivers and larger inflowing streams; travel by canoes was universal. No locality was so favorable as the open valley, and here the greater number of Indians doubtless dwelt. But the river and its fertile shores 150could not yield all that this people needed: they had to draw from the resources of the hills behind them. They soon marked the whole region with a net-work of trails leading to the various points whence they drew the necessities of life. The conditions of the present day are laid down on essentially the same lines as then.

An Indian town was not a temporary tent site, or mere cluster of wigwams, here to-day and miles away to-morrow; nor did these people depend solely upon the chase. Beside the trail over which I recently passed was a great clearing that had been an orchard. We can yet find many a barren spot that is rightly known to the people of to-day as an Indian field. So persistently were their cornfields cropped that at last the soil was absolutely exhausted, and has not yet recovered its fertility.

There was systematic bartering, too, as the red pipe-stone or catlinite from Minnesota and obsidian from the more distant Northwest, found on the Atlantic coast, as well as ocean shells picked up in the far interior, all testify. There was also periodical journeying in autumn from inland to the sea-coast to 151gather supplies of oysters, clams, and other “sea food,” which were dried by smoking and then “strung as beads and carried as great coils of rope” back to the hills to be consumed du............