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.
[Illustration: THE CONCORD COACH]
That yellow, mud-bespattered stage, with "E. Merriam, No. _something_,"
blazoned on the doors, was the one thing that linked the small
village with the great world, brought tidings of wars, accidents and
incidents, that had grown gray on the journey, and word from far-away
friends whose graves might have waxed green while the letters they had
written, and secured with a round red moon of a wafer, and sealed with
a thumb or a thimble, were yet trampled beneath the driver's feet like
grain on the threshing-floor. Think of that coach creeping like an
insect, for sixpence a mile, and five miles to the hour, to and fro
between East and West, the only established means of communication!
Think of its nine passengers inside, knocked about like the unlucky
ivories in a dice-box, between New York and Detroit, between Boston
and Washington. They get in, all strangers; the ladies on the back
seat, the man who is sea-sick, by one coach-window, the man that chews
"the weed, it was the devil sowed the seed," at the other; somebody
going to Congress, somebody going for goods, somebody going to be
married. They are all packed in at last like sardines, with perhaps an
urchin chucked into some crevice, to make all snug. There are ten
sorts of feet, and two of a sort, dovetailed in a queer mosaic upon
the coach-floor. The door closes with a bang, the driver fires a
ringing shot or two from his whip-lash, and away they pitch and lurch.
Think of them riding all day, all night, all day again, crushed hats
and elbowed ribs, jumping up and bouncing down into each other's laps
every little while with some plunge of the coach; butting at each
other in a belligerent way, now and then, as if "Aries the ram" were
the ruling sign for human kind; begging each other's pardon, laughing
at each other's mishaps, strangers three hours ago, getting to know
each other well and like each other heartily, and parting at last
with a clasp of the hand and a sigh of regret. I think a fifty-mile
battering in a stage-coach used to shake people out of the shell of
their crustaceous proprieties, and make more lifelong friends than a
voyage of five thousand miles by rail. The contemplation for a day or
two of a woman's back-hair or a man's bumps of combativeness, is about
as merry as a catacomb tea-party, and about as conducive to lively
friendships.
All of us who have arrived at years of discretion--had Methuselah?--have
had a suspicion for some time that this is not the same world we were
born into. Such a looking-over-the-shoulder as the writer has just
indulged in brightens the dim suspicion into certainty. It _is_ a
grander world, with grander needs and agencies to match. The little
iron wheels have trundled the big wooden wheels out of the way. The
dear old Concord coaches of the past are driven to the confines of
civilization. Jehu has swung himself down from his box, thrust the butt
end of his whip-stock into the tin horn's mouth, hung them up on a nail
behind the door, and died. The swallows flash in and out at the diamond
lights in the old stage barn, its only occupants.
I visited Fort Scott a while ago--Fort Scott, Kansas, that wonderful
bit of metropolitan vigor in the wilderness. The Missouri, Kansas and
Texas Railroad had reached it, and gone on to the Indian country. It
had been a grand center for radiating stage lines, and the day the
stages were to break up camp at Fort Scott and go deeper into Kansas,
farther into Missouri, somebody, who had caught the sentiment of the
thing, proposed that all the coaches should be grouped in one place,
and a photographer should train his piece of small artillery upon
them, and so they should be "taken." The picture is before me. The
four-in-hands, the great coaches, the snug covered hacks for the cross
cuts, the drivers in position, drivers and stages alike "all full
inside," and a sprinkling of deck passengers. It was the work of an
instant; the coaches were emptied and wheeled away, to be seen and
heard and welcomed and looked after in Fort Scott no more.