cries “G’lang,” and the horse reluctantly goes by, turning his head wistfully towards the flowing spout.  Ah, here comes an equipage strange to these parts, and John stands up to look; an elegant carriage and two horses; trunks strapped on behind; gentleman and boy on front seat and two ladies on back seat,—­city people.  The gentleman descends, unchecks the horses, wipes his brow, takes a drink at the spout and looks around, evidently remarking upon the lovely view, as he swings his handkerchief in an explanatory manner.  Judicious travelers.  John would like to know who they are.  Perhaps they are from Boston, whence come all the wonderfully painted peddlers’ wagons drawn by six stalwart horses, which the driver, using no rein, controls with his long whip and cheery voice.  If so, great is the condescension of Boston; and John follows them with an undefined longing as they drive away toward the mountains of Zoar.  Here is a footman, dusty and tired, who comes with lagging steps.  He stops, removes his hat, as he should to such a tree, puts his mouth to the spout, and takes a long pull at the lively water.  And then he goes on, perhaps to Zoar, perhaps to a worse place.

So they come and go all the summer afternoon; but the great event of the day is the passing down the valley of the majestic stage-coach, —­the vast yellow-bodied, rattling vehicle.  John can hear a mile off the shaking of chains, traces, and whiffle-trees, and the creaking of its leathern braces, as the great bulk swings along piled high with trunks.  It represents to John, somehow, authority, government, the right of way; the driver is an autocrat, everybody must make way for the stage-coach.  It almost satisfies the imagination, this royal vehicle; one can go in it to the confines of the world,—­to Boston and to Albany.

There were other influences that I daresay contributed to the boy’s education.  I think his imagination was stimulated by a band of gypsies who used to come every summer and pitch a tent on a little roadside patch of green turf by the river-bank not far from his house.  It was shaded by elms and butternut-trees, and a long spit of sand and pebbles ran out from it into the brawling stream.  Probably they were not a very good kind of gypsy, although the story was that the men drank and beat the women.  John didn’t know much about drinking; his experience of it was confined to sweet cider; yet he had already set himself up as a reformer, and joined the Cold Water Band.  The object of this Band was to walk in a procession under a banner that declared,

     “So here we pledge perpetual hate
      To all that can intoxicate;”

and wear a badge with this legend, and above it the device of a well-curb with a long sweep.  It kept John and all the little boys and girls from being drunkards till they were ten or eleven years of age; though perhaps a few of them died meantime from eating loaf-cake and pie and drinking ice-cold water at the celebrations of the Band.