THE OLD CHURCH SETTLEMENT

HE yellow glory of the stage-coach still illumines some of the valley roads in rural New England, and still by means of it, if

one bestir himself betimes, he may overtake that Past which is fleeing from us with accelerated speed.

This is specially true of the larger river valleys of our North Country. Here the four-horse coach still swings cumbersomely on its antiquated leathers and, rolling and pitching like a lumberman's lugger in the La Chine rapids, lunges along the post-roads of Northern and Central Vermont.

At regular intervals the horses stop to water at some roadside trough of hollowed log, or stone, or iron in the shape of a huge sap-kettle. At noon there is always the hour's halt at some wayside tavern — two thirds horse-sheds and one third dilapidated dwelling, of which the greater part on the ground floor is given over to the barn-like office, the colorless monotony of its sanded floor relieved here and there by the accidence of reds and browns in wooden chairs and earthen spittoons, in a pot or two of hardy blossoming geranium, and the leaping flame in the depths of a cavernous fireplace.

Here and there during the thirty miles of posting the stage stops at a farmhouse, and mystifying packages are left at the gate or door. Here and there in a woods'-road or on a hilltop the driver draws rein and winds a blast on his tin horn that wakens a sevenfold echo among the green heights, and summons the dwellers on the "back farms" to the rough box nailed to guide-post, cross-roads' tree, or fence that still serves for the rural post.

On an afternoon in mid-September, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety—, the stage from Alderbury was slowly climbing from terrace to terrace of the overlapping foot-hills of the Green Mountains, with now and then a galloping spurt on the short levels. The Hornet, yellow-bodied, banded with black, was empty save for a heterogeneous collection of bags, boxes, and packages piled higgledy-piggledy on the floor and seats. Several plethoric sacks of burlap leaned their top-heavy weight against the old-fashioned back-strap of the middle seat, and lurched and lunged with the chop-sea motion of the lumbering vehicle, but always righted themselves at the critical moment of unstable equilibrium.

It was so late in the season, and the passengers so rare, that the outside seats — that vantage ground for travellers — had been removed and the space filled with freight, among which were two crates of Rhode Island Red pullets, a woven-wire cot of peculiar construction, and a newly weaned pig in a grocery box.



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