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he had never experienced so much, lived so truly, and been so wholly himself, as during his travels on foot.
What can Hawthorne mean by saying in his English diary that “an American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country” ? So much of the charm of American pedestrianism lies in the by-paths!
For instance, the whole interior of Cape Ann, beyond Gloucester, is a continuous woodland, with granite ledges everywhere cropping out, around which the high-road winds, following the curving and indented line of the sea, and dotted here and there with fishing hamlets.
This whole interior is traversed by a network of footpaths, rarely passable for a wagon, and not always for a horse, but enabling the pedestrian to go from any one of these villages to any other, in a line almost direct, and always under an agreeable shade.
By the longest of these hidden ways, one may go from Pigeon Cove to Gloucester, ten miles, without seeing a public road.
In the little
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