Take an old man's memory. Only give it a touch, and it turns like a wheel between his two childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight.
When they made narrow wooden hands with slender wrists, and called them oars, and galleys swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately way, they did well. When they fashioned broad and ghastly palms of canvas that laid hold upon the empty air, and named them sails, they did better. When they grouped around an axle the iron hands that buffeted the waves and put the sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying ship, they had their wheel, and they did best!
A one-horse wagon—for nothing was buggy then, but neglected bedsteads—artistically bilious, and striped like a beetle, with a paneled box high before and behind, like an inverted chapeau, and a seat with a baluster back, softened and graced with a buffalo robe, warm in winter—and in summer also—was one of the wheeled wonders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon like a right-angled triangle—room in front for any possible length of leg, and a foot-stove withal—room behind for two or three handfuls of children, and a little hair-trunk with a bit of brass-nail alphabet on the cover. Curiously enough, the wagon was owned by that noble Baptist pioneer of the New York North Woods, Elder—not Reverend but revered—John Blodgett, and in it he used to traverse "East road," and "West road," and "Number Three road," and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, without shipping a sea, or, to borrow a morsel of thunder, without "seeing a ship." His was the voice of "John crying in the wilderness"—John, the Beloved disciple, he surely was.
Before he went to "the Ohio," for that is what they called it in the years ago, he preached a farewell to the saddened friends, "Sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more," and then some Christians, some children and some sinners accompanied him ten miles on his way, and, after that, the paneled wagon was lost in the wilderness and the West, and we all turned sorrowing home, and his words "no more" proved true.
And the next wheeled wonder was a calash-topped chaise, heavy, squeaky on its two great loops of leather springs, and a swaying, sleepy way with it, that, for the occupants was as easy as lying, but for the horse as wearisome as Pilgrim Christian's knapsack of iniquity.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONCORD COACH.
Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the crow flies, there is a village. What there was of it in the old days lay in the bottom of a bay of land bounded on the north, south, and west by wooded hills, with some stone-mason work in them older than the Vatican. But now the beautiful town rises like a spring-tide high up the green sides of the bay. Once in twenty-four hours over the south hill lurched a stage-coach. The tin horn was whipped out of its sheath by the driver, and a short, sharp, nasal twang rang out, rising sometimes in one long clear note, that warbled away in an acoustic ringlet, like its aristocratic cousin with a mouth like a brazen morning-glory—the bugle.
Every thing in the little village was broad awake. Doors flew open, faces were framed in at the windows, children hung on the gates. Then the driver gathered up the ribbons of his four-in-hand, swung off from the coach-top his long-lashed whip with its silken cracker, flicked artistically the off leader's "nigh" ear, gave the wheelers a neighborly slap, and with jingle of chains and rattle of bolt, and a sea-going rock and swing, down the hill he thundered and through the main street, the horses' ears laid close to their heads like a running rabbit's, a great cloud of dust rolling up behind the leather "boot" the color of an elephant, the passengers looking out at the stage windows, until, with a jolt and one sharp summons of the horn, like the note of a vexed and exasperated bee, the craft brings-to at the Post-office, and the driver whirls the padlocked pouch out from under his mighty boots to the ground, and then exploding the tip-end of his twelve-foot lash like a pistol-shot, he makes a sweep and comes about with a rattling halt in front of the stage-house. The fat old landlord—fat and old when you were a boy, and alive yet—shuffles out in slippers, opens the coach-door, swings down the little iron ladder with two rounds, and the passengers make a landing. One of them may have been General Brady, the man who said, or so they say, when told he could not survive the illness that prostrated him, "Beat the drum, the knapsack's slung, and Hugh Brady is ready to march!" Or it may have been Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king, and yet with his head on, which is not after the historic manner of monarchs out of business, going to his wilderness possessions in the North Woods. Or it may have been Frederick Hassler, the Swiss, Chief of the United States Survey in the long ago, en route for Cape Vincent—the man who knew more and tougher mathematics than all of his successors together, and who could say more while the hostlers were changing horses than anybody else could say in sixty minutes. Meanwhile the spanking team, loosed from the coach, file off in a knowing way and a cloud of steam, meeting with a snort of recognition the relay that is filing out to take their places.
THE CONCORD COACH