“Magical chances?” a young aviator on the Pacific Coast wrote lately. “I thought of them to-day as I flirted with a little bunch of cotton-wool clouds eight thousand five hundred feet above Point Loma. And I wondered what Dana would have thought had one of his shipmates sauntered across the deck of the Pilgrim, and, clapping him on the back, said: ‘I’ll meet you, old man, in fifteen minutes up there in that fleet of little clouds; if they whift and drift into space, wait for me at the five-thousand-foot altitude’?” So the frontier comes back. Pushed past the suburbs of Astoria City into the Pacific, it is seen crawling out on the sandy shores of Cape Cod with the next great storm. The single line of human footsteps across the polar snows has not left too packed and plain a trail. New snows have covered it, as new trees have shadowed the shores of Walden. Peary’s footprints, and Dr. Cook’s, too, would be very hard to follow. It was more than twenty-five years ago that I started from Savannah over the old stage-road to Augusta, finding my way by faint uncertain blazings on the tree-trunks through a hundred and thirty-odd miles of swamp. They were solemn miles. Trees thicker than my body grew in the ruts where wheels had run; more than once the great diamond rattlesnake coiled in my path, chilling the silence of the river bottoms with his shivering whirr. Once I heard the gobble of the wild turkey and the scream of the bobcat; and at night, while sleeping in an old abandoned church on the river bluff, I was awakened by the snuffling of a bear which had thrust its muzzle underneath the church door in the foot-worn hollow of the sill. It was a lonesome place. A faint road led away from it off through the swamp; but, aside from the gravestones near by, there were no other human signs around. How long since human feet had crossed the threshold, I do not know. The chintz altar-cloth that I tried to draw over me (the night was chill) crumbled at my touch and drifted off into a million dusty fragments. I had meant no desecration. I was very weary and had crept in through a window from the night and cold. A slow rain had settled down with the dusk, attended by darkness indescribably profound. And beneath the long-draped pines outside slept those whose feet had worn the threshold--slept undisturbed by the soughing of the wind, wrapped in the unutterable loneliness of the coiling river and the silent, somber swamp. Yet here had passed a highway between two great cities just a few years earlier, before the railroad was built farther out through the State. Already the swamp and the river had taken the highway for their own, and from human feet given it again to adventure, to the gliding form, the swift wing, and the soft padded foot.