for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the
resting school-ma'ams in the parlour would be recalled to the
consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman
might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
woods; but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust,
and the wind in the pine-trees, all day long.

A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler
threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed
his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all
day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the veranda,
silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes. And as
yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the
mountain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.

And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a
roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were, well
horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in
veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon
that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place
blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?--with its
city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in
the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that
hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from
the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad
China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the
secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of
girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of
our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
their momentary presence; gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like
Piccadilly Circus, this is also