door is a weatherbeaten
board inscribed with the rates of toll in letters so nearly effaced
that the gilding of the sunshine can hardly make them legible. Beneath
the window is a wooden bench on which a long succession of weary
wayfarers have reposed themselves. Peeping within-doors, we perceive
the whitewashed walls bedecked with sundry lithographic prints and
advertisements of various import and the immense show-bill of a
wandering caravan. And there sits our good old toll-gatherer,
glorified by the early sunbeams. He is a man, as his aspect may
announce, of quiet soul and thoughtful, shrewd, yet simple mind, who
of the wisdom which the passing world scatters along the wayside has
gathered a reasonable store.

Now the sun smiles upon the landscape and earth smiles back again upon
the sky. Frequent now are the travellers. The toll-gatherer's
practised ear can distinguish the weight of every vehicle, the number
of its wheels and how many horses beat the resounding timbers with
their iron tramp. Here, in a substantial family chaise, setting forth
betimes to take advantage of the dewy road, come a gentleman and his
wife with their rosy-cheeked little girl sitting gladsomely between
them. The bottom of the chaise is heaped with multifarious bandboxes
and carpet-bags, and beneath the axle swings a leathern trunk dusty
with yesterday's journey. Next appears a four-wheeled carryall peopled
with a round half dozen of pretty girls, all drawn by a single horse
and driven by a single gentleman. Luckless wight doomed through a
whole summer day to be the butt of mirth and mischief among the
frolicsome maidens! Bolt upright in a sulky rides a thin, sour-visaged
man who as he pays his toll hands the toll-gatherer a printed card to
stick upon the wall. The vinegar-faced traveller proves to be a
manufacturer of pickles. Now paces slowly from timber to timber a
horseman clad in black, with a meditative brow, as of one who,
whithersoever his steed might bear him, would still journey through a
mist of brooding thought. He is a country preacher going to labor at a
protracted meeting. The next object passing townward is a butcher's
cart canopied with its arch of snow-white cotton. Behind comes a
"sauceman" driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn,
beets, carrots, turnips and summer squashes, and next two wrinkled,
withered witch-looking old gossips in an antediluvian chaise drawn by
a horse of former generations and going t