He found that his horse had gone lame and could not take him all the way to New York. He drove the limping nag only so far as White Plains, and sent Cuff back with him. He waited in front of Purdy’s Store until the Red Bird coach was ready to start. He saw Dr. Chirnside waiting for the same stage, and he dreaded the ordeal of the old preacher’s garrulity. But there was no escape. The parson had come up to look over the churches in the Bedford Circuit and he was pretty sure to indulge in one of his long tirades against the evils of the times—especially the appalling atheism of the country, an inheritance from the Revolutionary sentiments. The colleges were full of it—of atheism, drunkenness, gambling—but Dr. Chirnside seemed to dread atheism far less than he dreaded the other sects of his own faith. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians were gaining a foothold in the countryside and he almost choked when he referred to the Catholics.
All the way down to New York Dr. Chirnside’s tongue kept pace with the galloping horses. He began with the stage itself. He remembered when even carriages were almost unknown in the rural districts. Gentlemen rode horses and carried their necessaries in valises swung from the saddle; ladies rode on pillions. Then light wagons came in, and carioles next, gigs, chaises, and chairs. And now stages with their luxury and their speed of nearly ten miles an hour!
As if that were not enough, a steam railroad was to ruin the peace of the country. Had Mr. RoBards ridden behind one of the engines that now drew the railway cars from the City Hall all the way to Harlem? No? He had been fortunate in his abstemiousness.
“The speed of these trains is only another instance of our mad passion for hurry. After a time people will return to their sanity, and the stage coaches will drive the fire-breathing monsters back to the oblivion they came from.
“Another evil of the railroad is that it will bring more and more of the wicked city element into the country. The aqueduct has practically ruined an entire region. Have you seen the hollow Chinese wall they are building for the Croton water? Ah, yes! Indeed! Most impressive, but if man’s work destroys God’s beautiful country where will be the profit?
“The Continental Sabbath will soon destroy the rural peace as it has already destroyed New York’s good name. The chains are no longer drawn across Broadway before the church services and any Tom, Dick, or Harry may now drive his rattletrap past the sacred edifice on his way to some pagan holiday.
“In the good old days even taking a walk on Sunday was recognized as a disrespect to the Lord. Nowadays men go driving! And not always without fair companions of the most frivolous sort. In my day a gentleman, passing his most intimate friend on the way to church, would greet him with a cold and formal nod. Nowadays people smile and laugh on Sunday as if it were merely a day like another! Where will it end? I tremble to think of it.
“I have just witnessed an example of the extent to which the new lawlessness is carrying us. Fortunately I was able to deal with it sternly.”
He told how some of the aqueduct laborers had spent their Sunday off, not in pious meditation and fasting, but in sauntering about the country. Their paganism had gone so far that when they came upon a patch of wild whortleberries growing by the roadside, they brazenly began to pick and eat them and gather others to take to their camp.
“Driving home from the service I chanced to see them, and I determined to put a stop at once to this violation of the laws of God and man. I ordered the county sheriff to arrest the culprits. They were fined a shilling each for the sacrilege.