Topsfield Bridge.
How charming are the reflections in the stilly waters, the arch making the perfect circle, ever an attractive and symbolic form. How cool and beautiful is the shadowy water under these stone arches; but it cannot be reached by the rider in stage-coach or on horseback, as can the brook spanned by a wooden bridge. This has often a watering place which spreads out on one side of the road, a shoal pool of clear, crystal, dancing water. The bottom is cut with the ruts of travellers’ wheels, but the water is pure and glistening; the pool is edged heavily with mint and thoroughwort and a tangle of greenery pierced with a few glorious scarlet spires of cardinal flowers, and some duller blooms. How boys love to wade in these pools, and dogs to swim in them, and horses to drink from them. The wooden bridge seems in midsummer a useless structure, fit only to serve as a trellis for clematis and sweet brier and many running vines, and to be screened with azalea, clethra, and elder, and scores of sweet-flowered shrubs that add their scent to the strong odor of mint that fills the air, as the sensitive leaves are bruised by careless contact.
The Shadowy Water under the Arches.
There was a closeness of association in stage-coach travel which made fellow-passengers companionable. One would feel a decided intimacy with a fellow-sufferer who had risen several mornings in succession with you, at daybreak, and ridden all night, cheek by jowl. Even fellow-travellers on short trips entered into conversation, and the characteristic inquisitiveness was shown. Ralph Waldo Emerson took great delight in this experience of his in stage-coach travel. A sharp-featured, keen-eyed, elderly Yankee woman rode in a Vermont coach opposite a woman deeply veiled and garbed in mourning attire, and the older woman thus entered into conversation: “Have you lost friends?” “Yes,” was the answer, “I have.” “Was they near friends?” “Yes, they was.” “How near was they?” “A husband and a brother.” “Where did they die?” “Down in Mobile.” “What did they die of?” “Yellow fever.” “How long was they sick?” “Not very long.” “Was they seafaring men?” “Yes, they was.” “Did you save their chists?” “Yes, I did.” “Was they hopefully pious?” “I hope so.” “Well, if you have got their chists (with emphasis) and they was hopefully pious, you’ve got much to be thankful for.” Perhaps this conversation should be recorded in the succeeding chapter, but in truth the pleasures and pains of stage-coach travel ran so closely side by side that they can scarce be separated. Many pleasant intimacies and acquaintances were begun on the stage-coach; flirtations, even courtships, were carried on. One gentleman remembers that when he was a big schoolboy he rode on the coach from Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to Dover, and he cast sheep’s-eyes at a pretty young woman who was a fellow-passenger. He had just gathered courage to address her with some bold, manly remark when the coach stopped and a middle-aged man of importance entered. Soon all other passengers got out and the three were left in the coach; and the Boy heard the Man recall himself to the Girl as having been her teacher when she was a child. He soon proceeded to make love to her, and made her a proposal of marriage, which she did not refuse, but asked a week’s time to consider. “And during all this courting,” said my informant, with indignant reminiscence after fifty years, “they paid no more attention to my presence than if I had been Pickwick’s Fat Boy.”
The pleasures of coaching days have been written by many an English author in forcible and beautiful language. Thomas De Quincey sang in most glowing speech the glories of the English mail-coach. He says:—
“Modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result, as that we actually find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But seated on the old mail-coach we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity.... The vital experiences of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it a-thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate energies that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, his spasmodic muscles and thunder-beating hoofs.”
Nothing more magnificent and inspiring could be written than his Going Down with Victory—the carrying the news of the victory at Waterloo on the mail-coach to English hamlets and towns; it is a gem of English literature.