While the world is rousing itself we may glance slightly at the scene of our sketch.  It sits above the bosom of the broad flood—­a spot not of earth, but in the midst of waters which rush with a murmuring sound among the massive beams beneath.  Over the 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 to peddle out a lot of huckleberries.  See, there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of lobsters.  And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green canvas and conveying the contributions of a whole herd of cows, in large tin canisters.