How very short seemed the time since he was last on this road!  Yet how much had things changed!  Fifteen years!  Was it possible he had been gone so long?  How rapidly they had gone over himself!  He felt scarcely a day older.  The stage-coach was aptly termed “Accommodation,” and Swan had great amusement, as he sat with the driver on the box, in noting the differences in the aspect of houses and people, since his own last ride over the same road.  New villages had sprung up here and there, while already more than one manufacturing establishment showed the Northern tendencies; and the elements of progress peeped from every settlement, in the shape of meeting- and school-houses.

When the driver whipped up his modest team to an animated trot before the Eagle Hotel in Walton, Swan felt as if he must have been in a dream only, and had just now awakened.  Walton was one of those New-Hampshire towns, of which there came afterwards to be many, which were said “to be good to go from”; accordingly, everybody had gone everywhere, except the old inhabitants and the children.  All the youths had gone towards “the pleasant Ohio, to settle on its banks”; and such maidens as had courage to face a pioneer settlement followed their chosen lords, while the less enterprising were fain to stay at home and bewail their singlehood.  All business was necessarily stagnant, and all the improvements, architectural or otherwise, which had marked the route on which Swan had come, now seemed suddenly to have ceased.  He might have thought Walton the Enchanted Palace, and himself the Fairy-Prince that was to waken to life and love the Sleeping Beauty.

How unchanged was everything!  The store where he used to sell crockery and pins,—­the great elm-tree in front of it,—­the old red tavern on the hill, where they had the Thanksgiving ball,—­the houses, from one end of the street to the other, all just as when he left:  he might have found his way in the dark to every one of them.

At the Eagle Tavern, the same men sat on the stoop, with chairs tilted back, smoking.  A man in the bar-room was mixing flip or gin-sling for two others, who were playing checkers.  Taft himself stood at the door, somewhat changed indeed, though he was always fat, but with the same ready smile as ever; and Swan could see through the windows, by the bright candle-light, the women flitting to and fro, in brisk preparations for supper.

Swan’s first touch of surprise was that Taft did not recognize him,—­him whom he used to see every day of his life!  That was strange.  It looked as if time told on Taft’s faculties a little.  He had himself recognized Taft in a moment.  So he had recognized everything, as they drove along, and now how familiar everything looked in the evening light!