to a wagon drawn behind him; thus carriages came into use, and the race
went bowling along the great highway of progress at a wonderful rate.
Then vehicles began to be improved, and the restless brain of the
inventor contrived a stage-coach for the convenience of those who had no
private carriages or did not care to use them; though rude at first, it
soon came to be luxurious, with thorough braces, upholstery, and glass
windows. But even this noisy vehicle, that abridged distance and brought
far cities near together, outgrew its usefulness and gave way to its
rival, the steam-car, which could hurry men through the land as on the
wings of a tornado. And now the same race, which in the morning of the
world was content to wander four or five miles between sun and sun, and
had no wish to go faster, can scarcely abide the slowness of a
palace-car sliding over a mile of steel rail each minute, and General
Meigs is importuning the Legislature for leave to construct a railway on
which trains shall run at three times that speed.

It would be too much to ask this hurrying, restless, nineteenth-century
world to retrace its way by rail and turnpike, saddle and sandal, back
to the slow patriarch, who kept his youth a hundred years, and in all
that time might not have traveled as far as a suburban gentleman of
to-day does in going once from his home to his place of business in
Boston. It might halt long enough, however, to enjoy a view of the
stage-coach in which its grandfathers got on so rapidly, rumbling before
a cloud of dust over the straight pike that used to connect the
metropolis with some lesser city.

Such a highway was the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike, the grand avenue of
public travel between Boston and Providence, and one link of the
continuous thoroughfare connecting New England with New York and
Washington. It was opened during the years of intense activity that