TAKING TOLL.
A gentleman of an autobiographic turn relates how he was instructed in the custom of taking toll, by a sprightly widow, during a moonlight sleigh-ride with a merry party. He says:
The lively widow L. sat in the same sleigh, under the same buffalo-robe, with me.
“Oh! oh! don’t, don’t!” she exclaimed, as we came to the first bridge, at the same time catching me by the arm and turning her veiled face towards me, while her little eyes twinkled through the moonlight.
“Don’t what?” I asked. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Well, but I thought you were going to take toll,” replied the widow.
“Toll!” I rejoined. “What’s that?”
“Well, I declare!” cried the widow, her clear laugh ringing out above the music of the bells, “you pretend you don’t know what toll is!”
“Indeed I don’t, then,” I said, laughing; “explain, if you please.”
“You never heard, then,” said the widow, most provokingly,—“you never heard that when we are on a sleigh-ride the gentlemen always,—that is, sometimes,—when they cross a bridge, claim a kiss, and call it toll. But I never pay it.”
I said that I had never heard of it before; but when we came to the next bridge I claimed the toll, and the widow’s struggles to hold the veil over her face were not enough to tear it. At last the veil was removed, her round, rosy face was turned directly towards mine, and in the clear light of a frosty moon the toll was taken, for the first time in my experience. Soon we came to a long bridge, with several arches; the widow said it was of no use to resist a man who would have his own way, so she paid the toll without a murmur.
“But you won’t take toll for every arch, will you?” she said, so archly that I could not fail to exact all my dues; and that was the beginning of my courtship.
