all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps, strings, and nails
should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully adapted to
every emergency,--that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that
almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted
his natural tact, expediency, and invention. With string and nail in his
pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus to get away from a Yankee, or
his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only been a
Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered
with roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own
powers, knew all about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the
light of a pine-knot in his father's kitchen. This rude culture is the
commonest fact among our mountaineers.

We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their
bright, concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like
to know who would stop anywhere now to see anything! One might as well
be put into a gun and fired off to New York as go there now by
steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not unlike a "resonant
steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the other.

But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as
_was_ a journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you
entered their hearts and took lodgings,--sometimes for life.

Then the country! You saw that, too,--not the poorest part of it,
scooting round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole
way flat, and are glad to shut your eyes and listen to the engine,
rather than have them ache with seeing everything you would never wish
to look at!

All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we
leave the Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long,
dreary reaches of unfertile pastures, and its wealth of stone wall,--so
abundant that travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it,
seeing no lack in the road or field,--from the time we enter on trim,
well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and
beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and
enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of
fine landscape, maturity. With and under the ol