The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

by Benjamin F. Taylor

In almost every old neighborhood there is an old road, disused and half forgotten, and we like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, and wander, in a summer's day, along its deserted route.

Our grandfathers had a species of indomitable directness in making roads and making love that was wonderful to see. They did not believe in the line of beauty; there was nothing curvilinear about them, either in word or deed. They went by square and compass, and life and religion were laid out like Solomon's Temple. And so, straight over the hill, and right through the big timber, and plump into the swamp, and bounce over the "corduroy," went the old road.

Its long bridges are broken and mossy now, and brown birds in white waistcoats build nests beneath them, undisturbed by the small thunder of the rumbling wheels.

Nobody goes that way, not even the boys bound out for school; for, ever so many years ago, in a November day, they have heard, a stranger went down by the old mill—you can see the rim of its dry gray wheel from here—and was never heard of more.

Years after, among the hemlocks, human bones were found, and to this day, on windy nights, groans come out of the gulf, and the troubled ghost is thought to be walking still.

Over yonder are a broad-disked sunflower and a heap of stone. The latter was once a hearth, for a house stood there, and after the stranger disappeared the tenant grew suddenly rich, as the times went, and showed gold with unknown words upon it, that none of the neighbors could make out, and pretty soon he took all that he had and went West; as some said to the "Genesee Country," and others to "the Ohio," which was yet more like a dream than the Genesee.

After that, nobody would live in the house, and it grew ruinous, and was haunted, and people saw a light there in dark nights, or thought they did, and the children shunned it, except in the brightest of mornings, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing, and the cows went lowing, Indian file, to the pasture; and after awhile, the old house tumbled down and crumbled away. Such stories thrive along old roads, even as the Mayweed, and the thistles, that nobody ever cuts, and on whose pink tops the yellow-birds rock up and down, like little boats at anchor, till the Fall winds whistle away the golden birds and the white down.

Even the brooks that used to tinkle across the track and under the little bridges, have somehow run dry, or gone another way, and you will see an old trough, dusty and bleached, by the roadside, the strip of bark, that brought the water from the hills, broken and scattered, and the earth worn hard and smooth with the tramping of many feet. Very long ago, a tin cup used to hang there, tethered with a string, for the sake of thirsty travelers. We like to stand by the deserted place, where only a broken thread of ice-cold water trickles its way down to the roadside, and fancy how eagerly, in the broad summer days, the horses, panting through the heavy sand and up the rocky hills, thrust their noses deep into the overflowing trough of crystal coolness, while, now and then, the cautious drivers pulled up their heads with a jerk, until they heard the long-drawn breath of inarticulate content.

We like to think that the dripping cup was borne to bearded lips that were eloquent and true of old, and lips, maybe, of beauty, that are dusty and dumb to-day; that bees from the shimmering fields came bugling thither, and crept, with dainty feet, along the trough's damp edge; that birds sat there, and drank and rendered their little thanks, and rode away upon the billowy air; that now and then a squirrel, red and sleek, with snowy throat, flashed chattering along the zigzag rails, and flashed away again; or a gray rabbit, with little noiseless leap and listening ears, took hurried draughts and squatted among the alders till the panting dog had lapped the nectar of the wayside spring.

There, where the Maple wears its crown, a lazy gate is swinging in the wind, sole relic of a fence that straggled round a home, of which the weedy, tangled hollow alone gives proof.