our ancestors adopted this system “in the year dot, before one was invented,” I suppose we shall bequeath the precious legacy to our latest posterity, unless some “Rebecca League,” similar to Taffy’s a few years since, be got up on a grand national scale, in which case tolls may, perhaps, be included in the tariff of free-trade.  Until that auspicious event take place,—­for I confess to an ever-increasing antipathy to paying any gate,—­we might profit in some of our bleak and dreary districts by copying the simple arrangement adopted at many American tolls, which consists of throwing a covered archway over the road; so that if you have to unbutton half-a-dozen coats in a snow-storm to find a sixpence, you are not necessitated to button-in a bucketful of snow, which, though it may cool the body, has a very opposite effect on the temper.

It is bad enough in England; but any one who wishes to enjoy it to perfection had better take a drive from Stirling, crossing the Forth, when, if he select his road happily, he may have the satisfaction of paying half-a-dozen tolls in nearly as many minutes, on the plea that this piece of ground, the size of a cocked-hat-box,—­and that piece, the size of a cabbage-garden,—­and so on, belong to different counties; and his amusement may derive additional zest if he be fortunate enough to find the same tollman there whom I met some years ago.  When passing his toll in a driving snow-storm that penetrated even to the very marrow, I pulled up a few yards beyond the gate, upon which he came out very sulkily, took the half-crown I tendered him, and, walking deliberately back, placed the change on the post of the gate, and said,—­“If ye want ’ut, ye may take ‘ut; it’s no my place to walk half a mile o’ the road to gie folk their change;” after which courteous address he disappeared, banging his door to with a sound that fell on the ear very like “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”  Precious work I had, with a heavy dog-cart, no servant, and a hack whose mouth was case-hardened.  I would willingly have given it up; but I knew the brute (the man, not the horse) would very soon have got drunk upon it; so I persevered until I succeeded, and then went on my road full of thoughts which are, I fear, totally unfit to be committed to paper.

Reader, I must ask you to forgive my wanderings on the banks of the Forth.  I hasten back to Geneseo, and pack up ready for to-morrow’s start, for the days I had spent with my kind host and his merry family had slipped by so pleasantly I had quite lost count of them.  There was but one cloud to our enjoyment—­one sad blank in the family group:  my sister-in-law, in whose charming society I had fondly hoped to make my first visit to the scenes of her early youth, had been recently summoned to a better world; and the void her absence made in that family circle, of which she was both the radiating and the centring point of affection, was too deeply felt for aught but time ever to eradicate.