The Ancient Highway: A Novel of High Hearts and Open Woods

A thickening came into Cliftons throat and his heart beat a little faster as he looked ahead of him, for it was more than twenty years ago that his feet had last traveled this way. He was sixteen then, and barefooted. And time had been kind to the little road, he thought. The velvety dust was the same, and he caught himself looking for the imprints of his naked feet as he waded through it; and the trees were the same, seeming not to have grown in those twenty years, and the thickets of his boyhood sprang up one by one, with the big rocks between only the rocks seemed smaller now than when he was a boy, and the hollows seemed a bit less steep, and the Big Woods, still uncut, held less of their old mystery and fearsomeness in the shadowing depths of sunset. A smile crept gently over his face, and in that smile were the pathos and joyous grief of reminiscence, of precious memories rising in his path and of faded years stirring with life again.