M. H.
For the Table Book.
THE TURNPIKE MAN.
“Good and bad of all sorts.”
As the “Commissioners” rely on the trust reposed in the “Pikeman,” I imagine him to be worthy of being shown in the most favourable colours. Like a good sexton, he must attend to his toll—like a salesman, know his head of cattle—like a lottery prize-seeker, be acquainted with his number—like Fielding’s Minos, in his “Journey from this world to the next,” shut his gate against those who are brought up improperly to the bar. A modern Gilpin should scarcely risk a ride unwittingly through his demesne.
In the “dead waste and middle of the night,” when sleep steals over him wearily, how many calls of the coachman, the chaise driver, the stanhope gentleman, the important bagman, and the drover, is he obliged to obey! The imperative “Pike!”—“Gate!”—“Hallo!”—are like so many knells rung in his ear. The clock is a friend to most men in the various occupations of life; the shadow on the grass warns the shepherd and hind to retire to rest; the dial gives the gardener leave to quit his vegetable and floral world in safety till the succeeding morning; but the pikeman finds no solace in the instructive progress of his Dutch-clock, or in the more highly favoured one with a window before its pulselike-pendulum, (as the person with a window in his breast,) or in the weather betokening “man and woman,” who, like an unhappy couple, never go out together.
Who that has looked upon the pikeman’s contracted span—his little white-painted hut, like a showman’s figured canvass—but shrewdly guesses that the best portions of his sunside of comforts are on the outside? What a Jack in the Box![480] He seems in his room like a singing-bird in a cage. His cat and dog are his companions, save when the newsman, postman, or any man, in short, arrives. Munden’s “Crack” is not to be seen at every turnpike gate. A magpie, or blackbird, often hangs and whistles, like himself, in stationary captivity. Yet he is a man of some information. The waggoner, the duellist, the huckster, and the Gretna folks, in pursuit of romantic happiness, sometimes make him useful. The horse patrol consults him in the way of business; few fights occur without his knowledge; and even the political express gives him broad hints as to the secret operations of his majesty’s ministers. He is completely au fait in all common concerns in his vicinity—a local “finger-post.”
Occasionally, I have seen a chubfaced, curly-headed child playing near his “box” on the roadside, like idleness in ease, with rushes and flags round its brow, enjoying the luxuries of fancied greatness, and twisting leaves and weeds together—emblems of our varied and united virtues. And I have beheld a pikeman’s housewife (if her dwelling may be called a house) busily employed within her narrow sphere to “keep things straight,” and “make both ends meet,” with an understanding, that “all’s well that ends well.”[481] And I have observed her lovely child, kneeling before its mother on a stool, with its palms pressed together, in the grateful attitude of an acknowledged beneficent Providence.
I once knew an upright and a civil pikeman. He had seen better days.—One of the beauties of education is, that it distinguishes a man, however he is placed.—He was planed down, as a carpenter might say, from the knots of pride, to smooth humanity. To use a beautiful, though much quoted, apostrophe by Avon’s bard, “I shall not look upon his like again!” All good characters give useful example:—they teach as they live, and win inferiors in virtue by the brightness and placidity of their decline and fall.