The _new_ road, of which I have spoken, and concerning which I heard so much said on all hands, was really not quite that, but rather a new laying out--with loops here and there to avoid the steeper pitches--of the road from Walhalla, over which I had driven on my entrance into the mountains. My friend Mr. S---- had made the surveys for the work, and the whole town was looking forward eagerly to its completion. Toward sunset, on a Sunday afternoon, I had been out of the village in an opposite direction, and was sitting by the wayside in the Stewart woods, full of flowers and music, where I loved often to linger, when three men approached on foot. “How far have you come?” I inquired. “From Franklin,”--about twenty miles distant,--they answered. They were going to work “on the new road up at Stooly” (Satulah Mountain), or so I understood the oldest of the trio, who acted throughout as spokesman. (In my part of the country it is only the professionally idle who walk twenty miles at a stretch.) “Well,” said I, none too politely, being nothing but an outsider, “I hope you’ll make it better than it was when I came up.” He replied, quite good-humoredly, that they were making a good road of it this time. And so they were, comparatively speaking, for I went over the mountain one day on purpose to see it, after I knew who had laid it out, and had begun to feel a personal interest in its success. One of the men carried a hoe, and one a small tin clock. They had no other baggage, I think. When a man works on the road, he needs a hoe to work with, and a timepiece to tell him when to begin and when to leave off. So I thought to myself; but I am bound to add that these workmen seemed to be going to their task as if it were a privilege. It eases labor to feel that one is doing a good job. That makes the difference, so we used to be told, by Carlyle or some one else, between an artist and an artisan; and I see no reason why such encouraging distinctions should not apply to road-menders as well as to menders of philosophy. There is no such thing as drudgery, even for a man with a hoe, so long as quality is the end in view.