CHAPTER XVI

THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD

The traveller in the old stage-coach was not tantalized by the fleeting half-glimpse of places which we gain in railroad travel to-day. He had ample time to view any unusual or beautiful spot as he passed, he had leisure to make inquiry did he so desire, he had also many minutes, nay hours, to hear any traveller's tale that could be told him by a fellow-journeyer or by the driver. This last-named companion, going over the stage road day after day, talking constantly, querying frequently, grew deeply versed in its lore, its history. He knew the gossip, too, of each house he passed, he knew the traditions and tales of each locality; hence in his company every mile of the road had some point of deep interest.

Roger Mowry's Tavern was the first one established in the town of Providence. It escaped destruction in King Philip's War, when nearly all the town was burned, and stood till the present day. When a coach started out from that old tavern, it passed the burying ground and a dense growth of barberry bushes which grew along the roadside. There seems to have been, in many places, a suspicion of uncanny reputation connected with barberry bushes. In one spot a dense group of bushes was said to harbor a vast snake; in another it shaded an Indian's grave; a third concealed a ghost. The barberry was not a native of America; it is an immigrant, and has the further ill name of blasting any wheat near which it is planted. The grewsome growth of barberry bushes near Mowry's Tavern was the scene of the first serious crime of the settlement of Providence Plantations. The town carpenter, a thrifty and much respected young man named Clauson, much beloved by Roger Williams, was found dying one winter morning in 1660 near "a clump of barberry bushes" at the parting of the paths "near Roger Mowry's Tavern." His head was cloven open with an axe, and the dying man accused a neighbor named Herndon of being the instigator of the crime; and with a spirit never learned from his old master, the gentle Williams, he left a terrible curse upon the children and children's children of John Herndon, that they should ever "be marked with split chins and be haunted by barberry bushes." An Indian named Wanmanitt was arrested for having done this terrible deed, and was locked up in the Mowry Tavern. He was probably executed for it, though the town records only contain a preliminary story of his trial. With bills for interpreters and for a boat and guard and powder and shot and liquor, all to go with the prisoner to Newport jail, the Indian murderer vanishes down the bay out of history. John Herndon lived on peacefully for many years, branded, doubtless, in the minds of many; but there is no record that the futile imprecation of the dying man ever was fulfilled.

As the stage-coach runs along through old Narragansett, it comes to another scene of crime, of horrible crime and horrible punishment--that of hanging in chains. This demoralizing sight was almost unknown in America. You can scarcely read a tale, a history of old English life, without hearing of men "hanging in chains." That most popular of children's books, _The Fairchild Family_, has a typical English scene, wherein the solemn English father, in order to make his children love each other the more, takes them through a lonely wood to see the body of a man hanging in chains on a gibbet, a horrible and revolting sight. Travellers on the Portsmouth Road in England, after the year 1786, passed at Hind Head a gibbet with three men swinging in chains, three barbarous murderers of an unknown sailor--not a pleasant outlook for tired riders on the coach. By the old South Ferry in Narragansett, a man was murdered by a fellow-traveller. At the inn where they had rested the last night one of them spent on this earth, a woman had dressed his hair, and she noted a curious white lock which grew like our artist Whistler's in a thick head of black hair. On this single identification was built a chain of evidence which ended in that unusual and terrible sight in the new world, the body of a criminal hanging in chains. It swung there till the poor bones dropped to the earth, and finally the great chains rusted apart. Then schoolboys took the heavy links which had bound a sight they had not seen, and with equal bravado and apprehension cracked open their winter store of hickory nuts and butternuts with the last emblem of an obsolete law.

Not far from this scene is a crossroads which could be viewed from the stage-coach, but I trust no traveller saw there the execution of a law as obsolete and as barbaric as hanging in chains.

For on this crossroads took place several of those eccentric, ridiculous performances known as "shift-marriages." Any widow, about to be married again, could be free from all debts of her dead husband's contracting by being married at the crossroads, "clad only in her shift." Sometimes she was enjoined to cross the King's Highway four times thus scantily clad.

George Hazard, Justice, made entry in the town book of South Kingston, Rhode Island, that Abigail Calverwell on the 22d of February, 1719, was taken in marriage "after she had gone four times across the highway in only her shift and hair low and no other clothing." Think of this poor creature, on this winter's night, going through such an ordeal. Another Narragansett widow, Jemima Hill, was married at midnight "where four roads meet," clad only in her shift. Another entry in a town record-book specifies that the bride had "no other clothing but shifting or smock." Let me hasten to add that these marriages were not peculiar to Rhode Island; they took place in many of the colonies, certainly in Pennsylvania and in all the New England states.

As the old Narragansett coach sped on through Connecticut, it passed lonely spots which were noted for other sad tales and traditions, but were ever of keen interest to all passers-by. For at the crossroads "where four roads meet," were buried suicides, with a stake thrust through the heart. This was a cruel old English and Dutch law. We learn from Judge Sewall all of the public obloquy and hatred of a suicide in Massachusetts. One poor fellow found dead was buried in disgrace under a pile of stones at a Connecticut crossroads, but the brand of self-destruction was taken from him at a later date, when much evidence was secured that he was murdered.

If our Narragansett coach went over the Ridge Hill, the driver surely pointed out the spot where a lover once hid his coach and horses till there rode up from a bridle-path near by the beauty of Narragansett, "Unhappy Hannah Robinson," who jumped from her horse into the coach and drove off headlong to Providence to be married. An elopement should end happily, but the adjective ever attached to her name tells the tale of disappointment, and it was not many years ere she was borne back, deserted and dying, lying on a horse-litter, to the spacious old home of her childhood, which is still standing. And one day down this road there came hotly lashing his horses a gay young fellow driving tandem a pair of Narragansett pacers, and he scarcely halted at the tavern as he asked for the home and whereabouts of the parson. But the tavern loungers peeped under the chariot-hood and saw a beautiful blushing girl, and they stared at a vast, yawning, empty portmanteau, strapped by a single handle to the chariot's back. And soon two angry young men, the bride's brothers, rode up after the elopers, who had been tracked by the articles of the bride's hastily gathered outfit which had been strewn from the open portmanteau along the road in the lovers' hasty flight. Who that rides on a railway car ever hears anything about elopements or such romances! Parson Flagg, of Chester, Vermont, made his home a sort of Yankee Gretna Green; the old stage-drivers could tell plenty of stories of elopers on saddle and pillion who rode to his door.

[Illustration: Midsummer along the Pike.]

The traveller by the coach learned constant lessons from that great teacher, Nature. Even if he were city bred he grew to know, as he saw them, the various duties of country life, the round of work on the farm, the succession of crops, the names of grains, and he knew each grain and grass when he saw it, which few of city life do now. He saw the timid flight of wild creatures, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, sometimes a wily fox. My father once, riding on a stage-coach in Vermont, chased down a mountain road a young deer that ran, bewildered, before its terrible pursuer. At night the traveller heard strange sounds, owls and a smothered snarl as the coach entered the woods--a catamount perhaps. He heard the singing birds of spring and noted the game-birds of autumn; and in winter they could watch the broad and beautiful flight of the crows, free in snowy woods and fields from the rivalry of all fellow feathered creatures. He saw the procession of wild flowers, though he, perhaps, did not consciously heed them, and he knew the trees by name. The stage-driver showed his passengers "the biggest ellum in the county," and "the best grove of sugar-maples in the state." He pointed out a lovely vista of white birches as "the purtiest grove o' birch on the road," and there was a dense grove of mulberry trees, the sole survivors of silk-worm culture in which were buried so many hours and years of hard labor, so much hard-earned capital, so many feverish hopes. And towering a giant among lesser brothers, a glorious pine tree still showing the mark of the broad arrow of the King, chosen to be a mast for his great ships, but living long after he was dead and his ships were sunken and rotten, living to be a king itself in a republican land.

[Illustration: A Vista of White Birches.]

The foot-farer, trudging along the outskirts of the village, is often shut out by close stone or board barriers from any sight of the flowering country gardens, the luxuriance of whose blossoming is promised by the heads of the tall hollyhocks that bend over and nod pleasantly to him; but the traveller on the coach could see into these old gardens, could feast his eyes on all the glorious tangle of larkspur and phlox, of tiger lilies and candytuft, of snowballs and lilacs, of marigolds and asters, each season outdoing the other in brilliant bloom.

And what odors were wafted out from those gardens! What sweetness came from the lilacs and deutzias and syringas; from clove-pinks and spice bush and honeysuckles; how weird was the anise-like scent of the fraxinella or dittany; and how often all were stifled by the box, breathing, says Holmes, the fragrance of eternity! The great botanist Linnaeus grouped the odors of plants and flowers into classes, of which three were pleasing perfumes. To these he gave the titles the aromatic, the fragrant, the ambrosial--our stage-coach traveller had them all three.

From the fields came the scent of flowering buckwheat and mellifluous clover, and later of new-mown hay, sometimes varied by the tonic breath of the salt hay on the sea marshes. The orchards wafted the perfumes from apple blossoms, and from the pure blooms of cherry and plum and pear; in the woods the beautiful wild cherries equalled their domestic sisters.

[Illustration: The Hollyhocks' Promise.]

How sweet, how healthful, were the cool depths of the pine woods, how clean the hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, and juniper, and how sweet and balsamic their united perfume. And from the woods and roadsides such varied sweetness! The faint hint of perfume from the hidden arbutus in early spring, and the violet; the azalea truly ambrosial with its pure honey-smell; the intense cloying clethra with the strange odor of its bruised foliage; the meadowsweet; the strong perfume of the barberry; and freshest, purest, best of all, the bayberry throwing off balm from every leaf and berry. Even in the late autumn the scent of the dying brakes and ferns were as beloved by the country-lover as the fresh smell of the upturned earth in the spring after the farmer's plough, or the scent of burning brush.

[Illustration: The Cool Depths of the Pine Woods.]

Fruit odors came too to the happy traveller, the faint scent of strawberries, the wild strawberry the most spicy of all, and later of the dying strawberry leaves; even the strong and pungent onions are far from offensive in the open air; while the rich fruity smell of great heaps of ripe apples in the orchards is carried farther by the acid vapors from the cider mills, which tempt the driver to stop and let all taste new apple-juice.

In the days of the stage-coach we had on our summer journeys all these delights, the scents of the wood, the field, the garden; we had the genial sunlight, the fresh air of mountain, plain, and sea; and all the wild and beautiful sights which made the proper time for travel--the summer--truly joyful. Now we may enjoy a place when we get there, but we have a poor substitute for the coach for the actual travelling--a dirty railway car heated almost to tinder by the sun, with close foul air (and the better the car the fouler and closer the air) filled, if we try to have fresh air, with black smoke and cinders; clattering and noisy ever, with occasional louder-shrieking whistles and bells, and sometimes a horrible tunnel--it has but one redeeming quality, its speed, for thereby the journey is shortened.

[Illustration: Taylor's Tavern. 1777, Danbury, Connecticut.]

Cheerful friends on the old roads were the milestones and guideposts. Milestones had an assured position in social life, a dignified standing. It would be told of a road as a great honor and distinction, and told fitly in capitalized sentences thus, "This Elegant road is fully Set with well-cut Milestones." A few of the old provincial milestones remain, and put us closely in touch with the past. In Governor Hutchinson's day milestones were set on all the post-roads throughout Massachusetts. Several of these are still standing; one is in Worcester, in the heart of the city, marked "42 Mls. to Boston, 50 Mls. to Springfield, 1771." Another is in Sutton. It is five feet high and nearly three feet wide. It is marked "48 mls. to Boston. B. W." The letters B. W. stand for Bartholomew Woodbury, a genial tavern-keeper of Sutton. It shows a custom which obtained at that date. It was deemed most advantageous to a tavern to have a milestone in front of it. Possibly the tale of the stone shown in its lettering urged wayworn travellers to halt and rest within the welcoming door. Bartholomew Woodbury's Tavern was a few rods from the spot marked for the stone, but the government permitted him to set this stone by his doorside, at his own expense, beside the great horse-block. Tavern-keeper and tavern are gone, and the old road sees few travellers. Occasionally some passer-by, inquisitive like myself of the presence of the old stone, will halt as did the traveller of old, and pull away the curtain of vines, and read the lettering of this gravestone of the old Woodbury Tavern.

[Illustration: M. M. Taylor's Milestone.]

Another landlord who appreciated that the milestone served as a magnet to draw customers to the tavern taproom was Landlord Taylor, who kept the old tavern known as "Taylor's," in Danbury, Connecticut. The house with the milestone is shown on page 350 and the milestone alone on page 351.

[Illustration: Peleg Arnold's Milestone.]

Judge Peleg Arnold was one of the most active patriots in northern Rhode Island during the Revolution; for many years he carried on a tavern at Union Village, a suburb of Woonsocket, and his house was noted for its excellence and hospitality. Not far from his tavern to the northward the "Great Road" from Smithfield into Mendon wound through woods and meadows and over the northern hills of Rhode Island.

In 1666 this great road was a small foot-path through the woods, and was indicated by marked trees leading from cabin to cabin; but in 1733 it had taken upon itself the dignity of a cart-path and then became the subject of discussions on town-meeting days. Peleg Arnold had been one of the men to re-lay the old road, and it was near the northern boundary of his farm that he set up the old milestone shown here. For more than a hundred and twenty-five years this stone has served to brighten the hearts of travellers, for they have learned to know that this silent and inanimate guide can be relied upon as to distances with much more certainty than can the words of residents in the neighborhood.

When Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster-general, he set an indelible postmark in many ways on the history of our country; and many mementos of him still exist. Among them are the old milestones set under his supervision. He transacted this apparently prosaic business with that picturesque originality which he brought to all his doings and which renders to every detail of his life an interest which cannot be exceeded and scarcely equalled by the events recorded of any other figure in history.

He drove over the roads which were to be marked by milestones, seated in a comfortable chaise, of his own planning, and followed by a gang of men, and heavy carts laden with the milestones. Attached to the chaise was a machine of his invention which registered by the revolution of the wheels the number of miles the chaise passed over. At each mile he halted, and a stone was dropped which was afterward set. The King's Highway, the old Pequot Trail, was thus marked and set. A few of these milestones between Boston and Philadelphia are still standing, one in New London, another at Stratford, and are glanced at carelessly by the hundreds of thousands who glide swiftly past on wheels bearing more accurate cyclometers than that of Franklin.

Guide-boards always stood at the crossings of all travelled roads; indeed, they stood where the roads were scarce more than lines among the grass and low shrubs. Since our day of many railroads, and above all, since the interlacing network of trolley lines has spread over all our Eastern lands where once the stage-coach ran, many guide-boards have disappeared and have not been replaced. You find them often at the angles of the road lying flat in grass and bushes; or standing split, one-sided, askew, pointing the road to the skies, or nowhere. When in trim and good repair in the days of their utility and helpfulness, they were friendly things, and the pointing hand gave them a half-human semblance of cheerful aid. Where the road led through woods or rarely frequented ways, they were friends indeed, for all ways looked alike, and one might readily go far astray. The mile of the guide-board was an elastic one, and sometimes a weary one.

Guide-boards, even poor ones, are still most welcome. No one in the country ever has any correct estimate of distances; a distance "a little better than three miles" before you usually increases by an extraordinary law instead of decreases after you have driven nearly a mile to "about four mile." The next road-jogger says "nigh on to a mile"; and then you may be sure a few hundred feet farther on to jump back to a slow and wise rejoinder of the original distance, "hard on to four mile."

[Illustration: The Watering Trough.]

Another wayside friend of the traveller in coaching days was the watering trough. It was frequently a log of wood hollowed out, Indian fashion, like a dug-out, filled with the lavish bounty of untrammelled Nature by a cool pure rill from a hillside spring. One of these watering troughs is shown on this page. In the days of the glory of the stage-coach and turnpike, fine stone troughs chiselled like an Egyptian sarcophagus took the place of the log dug-out. They had their supply from a handled pump, which was a more prosaic vehicle than the pipe made of hollowed tree-trunks which brought the spring-water; but it had also a certain interest as the water spouted out in response to the vigorous pumping, and it has been immortalized by Hawthorne. Our artesian wells, and sunken pipes, and vast reservoir systems are infinitely better than the old-time modes of water supply, but we miss the pleasure that came from the sight of the water, whether it was borne to us on the picturesque well-sweep by wheel and bucket, or old chain pump; it was good to look at as well as to taste, and it refreshed man even to see cattle and horses drinking from the primitive trough.

There is always something picturesque and pleasant in an old bridge, and of historic associations as well. The great logs such as form a wooden bridge over a narrow stream are the most natural waterspans, those of the primitive savages. By fallen tree-trunks placed or utilized by the Indians, the colonists first crossed the inland streams, adding parallel trunks as years passed on and helping hands multiplied; and finally placing heavy, flat cross-timbers and boards when hand-saws and sawmills shaped the forests' wealth for domestic use.

The old arched stone bridges are ever a delight to the eye and the thoughtful mind. Look at the picture of the old Topsfield Bridge shown on the opposite page. It was built in 1760 over the Ipswich River. It shows the semicircle--simplest of all arched forms--which is happily within the compass and ever the selection of rustic builders. The shallow voussoirs speak of security and economy rather than of monumental effect; the irregular shape and size of the stones tell a similar tale, that there was ample and fitting material near by, in every field. The arched stone bridge is a primitive structure; the sort of construction that may be found in the so-called "Cyclopean" walls of earliest Greece; and this very simplicity is a distinct beauty, that, added to its fitness and durability, makes the bridge a thing of satisfaction.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

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