[Illustration: The Shadowy Water under the Arches.]
There was a closeness of association in stage-coach travel which made fellow-passengers companionable. One would feel a decided intimacy with a fellow-sufferer who had risen several mornings in succession with you, at daybreak, and ridden all night, cheek by jowl. Even fellow-travellers on short trips entered into conversation, and the characteristic inquisitiveness was shown. Ralph Waldo Emerson took great delight in this experience of his in stage-coach travel. A sharp-featured, keen-eyed, elderly Yankee woman rode in a Vermont coach opposite a woman deeply veiled and garbed in mourning attire, and the older woman thus entered into conversation: "Have you lost friends?" "Yes," was the answer, "I have." "Was they near friends?" "Yes, they was." "How near was they?" "A husband and a brother." "Where did they die?" "Down in Mobile." "What did they die of?" "Yellow fever." "How long was they sick?" "Not very long." "Was they seafaring men?" "Yes, they was." "Did you save their chists?" "Yes, I did." "Was they hopefully pious?" "I hope so." "Well, _if you have got their chists_ (with emphasis) and they was hopefully pious, you've got much to be thankful for." Perhaps this conversation should be recorded in the succeeding chapter, but in truth the pleasures and pains of stage-coach travel ran so closely side by side that they can scarce be separated. Many pleasant intimacies and acquaintances were begun on the stage-coach; flirtations, even courtships, were carried on. One gentleman remembers that when he was a big schoolboy he rode on the coach from Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to Dover, and he cast sheep's-eyes at a pretty young woman who was a fellow-passenger. He had just gathered courage to address her with some bold, manly remark when the coach stopped and a middle-aged man of importance entered. Soon all other passengers got out and the three were left in the coach; and the Boy heard the Man recall himself to the Girl as having been her teacher when she was a child. He soon proceeded to make love to her, and made her a proposal of marriage, which she did not refuse, but asked a week's time to consider. "And during all this courting," said my informant, with indignant reminiscence after fifty years, "they paid no more attention to my presence than if I had been Pickwick's Fat Boy."