How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during this journey of three days and a half to New York?  Modern travellers, who are, or are not, as it happens, run off the track, smashed up, or otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed of, have little notion of our successive and amusing accidents, and of how they diversified and occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the ennui which comes from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one of accident.

That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,—­that one of the leaders had fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our driver, who was in hopes the critter wouldn’t have ’em that day,)—­that the coach wholly collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into a promiscuous heap of unbroken bones,—­this, and such as this, will be easily believed by any New-England traveller who remembers thirty years back.  But how we fell so softly that the brains were never damaged,—­why falling into ditches at night wasn’t an unhealthy process,—­and, above 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 No amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted his natural tact, expediency, and invention.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!