The rough track of this first highway westward may be followed today almost at any point in all its course between the Potomac and the Monongahela, and the great caverns and gullies which mark so plainly its tortuous course speak as no words can of the sufferings and dangers of those who travelled it during the dark half century when it offered one of the few passage-ways to the West. It was a clear, sweet October day when I first came into Great Meadows to make there my home until those historic hills and plains became thoroughly familiar to me. From the Cumberland Road, as one looks southward from Mount Washington across Great Meadows and the site of Fort Necessity, the hillside beyond is well-timbered on the right and on the left; but between the forests lies a large tract of cultivated ground across which runs, in a straight line, the dark outline of a heavy unhealed wound. A hundred and fifty years of rain and snow and frost have been unable to remove, even from a sloping surface, this heavy finger mark. Many years of cultivation have not destroyed it, and for many years yet the plow will jolt and swing heavily when it crosses the track of Braddock's Road. I was astonished to find that at many points in Fayette and neighboring counties the old course of the road can be distinctly traced in fields which have for half a century and more been under constant cultivation. If, at certain points, cultivation and the elements have pounded the old track level with the surrounding ground, a few steps in either direction will bring the explorer instantly to plain evidence of its course--except where the road-bed is, today, a travelled lane or road. On the open hillsides the track takes often the appearance of a terrace, where, in the old days the road tore a great hole along the slope, and formed a catchwater which rendered it a veritable bog in many places. Now and then on level ground the course is marked by a slight rounding hollow which remains damp when the surrounding ground is wet, or is baked very hard when the usual supply of water is exhausted. In some places this strange groove may be seen extending as far as eye can reach, as though it were the pathway of a gigantic serpent across the wold. At times the track, passing the level, meets a slight ridge which, if it runs parallel to its course, it mounts; if the rising ground is encountered at right angles, the road ploughs a gulley straight through, in which the water runs after each rain, preserving the depression once made by the road. And as I journeyed to and fro in that valley visiting the classic spots which appear in such tender grace in the glad sunshine of a mountain autumn, I never passed a spot of open where this old roadway was to be seen without a thrill; as James Lane Allen has so beautifully said of Boone's old road through Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, so may the explorer feelingly exclaim concerning Braddock's old track: "It is impossible to