" And when Rene and
Atala were escaping through those forests they "advanced with difficulty
under a vault of smilax, amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and
creeping-ivy that entangled our feet like nets.... Bell serpents were
hissing in every direction, and wolves, bears, carcajous and young tigers,
come to hide themselves in these retreats, made them resound with their
roarings." [Footnote: Chateaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.]
A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to accept this as an
accurate description of scenes which, as I have intimated, it is now
suspected that Chateaubriand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his
body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley and its roads--having
in mind, to be sure, the forests a little farther north than those in
which Atala and Rene wandered--assures us that they were neither
"pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775 (eighteen years before
the first white settlement in the State of Ohio) there were probably as
many paths within the bounds of that State on which a man could travel on
horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as there are railways in that
State to-day.
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