Vial

“ Imagine the carriage driving very slowly onwards, when you suddenly hear a sweet female voice carrolling away in all the wildness of nature, and this without knowing whence it comes. On a sudden, coming nearer the bottom of the hill, you see on one side of the road a cottage chimney, peeping as it were from a tuft of trees in a dell, and immediately afterwards, coming in front, behold a girl picking grapes for the press, and chearfully singing over her toil. ”

“ As we are whirled along in a railway train even, the thing that stirs our imagination is the roads, the paths. I can still remember glimpses of these that I had years ago—a footpath over a rounded hilltop through long yellow grass, a rough logging-road beside a foaming mountain river, a brushy wood road leading through bars into deep shade, a country road at dusk, curving past a low farmhouse with lights in the windows. ”

“ Sometimes, it is true, the highway lies by the side of a foaming torrent, hurrying over stones and boulders to join the sea; sometimes it climbs amongst untrodden snows; sometimes it creeps along the edge of the foam-clad blue, or wanders through a grove of tall and silent pines. ”

“ Some ten minutes’ driving, up a hill or two, while lamps grow less and less frequent, and we are out of the town, rolling along a road which is as good as an ordinary English turnpike-road—passing every now and then through spots of perfect darkness, where clumps of firs overhang the road on each side, and new again looking over a broad spread of water stretching away from our feet, with a row of distant wooded slopes appearing more and more clearly as the moon slowly rises. ”

“ After your farthest wandering, you are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush. ”

“ The carriage never went out on Sundays, because the church was not far off.
It was a great treat to us to be turned out into the home paddock or the old orchard; the grass was so cool and soft to our feet, the air so sweet, and the freedom to do as we liked was so pleasant—to gallop, to lie down, and roll over on our backs, or to nibble the sweet grass. ”

“ The carriages are so small—two-storied though they are—that one feels as if one were taking a drive in a donkey-cart or station fly, and more than once we were almost impelled to call out to our driver to stop and let us gather wild-flowers by the wayside. ”

“ You can see nature from the windows of your carriage, but you can converse with her only by a quiet stroll amidst her scenes. On the right were the great plains which the Po waters, finely mottled with meadow and corn-field, besprint with chestnut trees, mulberries, and laurels, and fringed, close by the highway, with rolling heights, on which grew the vine. ”

“ And as the picturesque trail is converted into the eminently modern and respectable macadamized road, the equally picturesque pack-train disappears and in its place we see, and smell, that emblem of the twentieth century, the automobile. ”

“ It is a lonelier road now than ever it had been in all the centuries between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the railway era. Railways at one blow took not only the passenger traffic, but the carriage of goods and minerals; and the cattle and sheep once driven in hundreds of thousands along the highways and byways began to be despatched in cattle-trucks. ”

“ The windows of the railway carriages are crowded with the faces of boys and girls, all of them weeping with the helpless abandonment of sheer despair. The engine whistles. There is a rush to the carriage windows. Faces and hands are thrust out of them. ”

“ The road itself, to be sure, does not add to the beauty of the avenues along which it runs, but it is not by any means the eyesore one might imagine; and the trains, with their light, graceful, and elegantly proportioned cars, so different from our squat and formless railway carriages, seem to me a positively beautiful feature of the city life. ”

“ The road was wide enough for the carriage and no more; soft as a carpet, so that the wheels made no noise, with big trunks of pines, palmettoes, oaks, sweet-gums, magnolias, [143] and what not crowding upon the track so closely that we could almost put out our hands and touch them as we passed. In the whole distance, to the best of my recollection, we met neither carriage nor foot-passenger. ”

“ Amand the highway is a straight line and, as we descend, it stretches away until lost in perspective, a magnificent route for high speed, and as Jean puts the auto to its best; we skim along scarcely seeming to touch the earth,—hills rise and fall, and the motion is joyous, while the spring winds sweep the dreams of dead kings off and away, leaving only the smell of the grasses and blossoming fruit trees. ”

“ Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular torrent—the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses—everything indeed except the few private carriages—are as novel, as distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph. ”

“ Fancy a driver travelling every day with high wooden fences on each side, fancy the amount of good timber needed to block the open view, fancy the agony of travelling by train, and then fancy the great silliness of doctors talking like that. ”

“ The carriage stopped under fine single trees, at the entrance of a beautiful wood; the noise of the Lin pointed out the way by a winding path to a very thick part of the wood, facing the Lin, which at once astonishes and delights. ”

“ There were few to share the highway with me: a farmer with an empty wagon, urging his team on and giving me a churlish glance instead of an invitation to ride; a horseman on an elegant chestnut picking his course carefully among the chuckholes, and a few tramps, each bent on his solitary way, at once defensive and aggressive. The condition of the bridges accounted for the absence of minibiles. ”

“ We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of that drive vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas and oil and electric light, the crowds of people in the streets, the place in Regent Street to which we went, and the sumptuous dinner we were served with there. ”

“ There would be a few pedestrians, a passing cab or so, and perhaps in the morning a dust-cart collecting refuse filth—set out for the winds to play with in boxes and tin receptacles at the pavement edge—or a man in a uniform cleaning the streets with a hose. ”

“ A carriage path, well gravelled and kept perfectly free from dirt and weeds, wound around among these primeval trees, occasionally emerging from their shade, as if to give the approaching stranger an opportunity to view every part of the delightful landscape. ”

“ And having put the pipe into an inner pocket, I opened the gate and started off at a good pace along the broad highway.
It was a bleak, desolate world that lay about me, a world of shadows and a white, low-lying mist that filled every hollow and swathed hedge and tree; a lowering earth and a frowning heaven infinitely depressing. ”

“ And the vehicular traffic of the street is essentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs. The cab is a simple development of the carriage, the omnibus of the coach, and the supplementary traffic of the underground and electric railways is a by no means brilliantly imagined adaptation of the long-route railway. ”

“ All the traffic with the interior is carried on by mules, strings of which, laden with panniers or with skins full of oil, jostle the passenger at every turn in the street. It is hardly necessaiy to add that wheeled carriages are unknown. ”

“ There are tram-ways, or horse railways, along the broad and well-made streets, the lawns are velvety with English grasses, and along the banks of the winding river the weeping-willow droops almost to the surface of the water. ”

“ The carriage-road is equally alive, with people riding and driving along; farmers and country gentlemen, country clergymen, parish overseers, and various other personages, drawn to the market-town by some real or imagined business, are rattling forward on horseback, or in carriages of various kinds, gigs, and spring-carts, and carts without springs. ”

“ Being pent-up in a railway carriage with half-a-dozen manikins and womanikins, who suck oranges half the time, and obtrude their little persons between your view and the window the other half, is not perhaps the most favourable situation from which to contemplate the beauties of nature ”

“ Yet these are too great a distance: some are especially affected with such objects as be near, to see passengers go by in some great road-way or boats in a river, in subjectum forum despicere, to oversee a fair, a market-place, or out of a pleasant window into some thoroughfare street to behold a continual concourse, a promiscuous rout, coming and going.”
p. 82Indifferent roads and uneasy carriages, riding post, and dread of highwaymen, darkness or the inclemency of the seasons, led, as by a direct consequence, to the construction of excellent inns in our island. ”

“ Cabs conveying passengers home or on visits drove by frequently, and every now and then the electric cars flew by, stirring up a cloud of dust which almost blinded one, and which for a moment shrouded the street with a moving, impalpable veil. ”

“ This vale serves the purpose of a road. It is a tedious maze and perpetual declivity, and requires, from the passenger, a cautious and sure foot. Openings and ascents occasionally present themselves on each side, which seem to promise you access to the interior region, but always terminate, sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice or the bottom of a steep. ”

“ The long-drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year—I was in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to sacrifice speed to contemplation—is doubtless familiar now with the rush of the motor-car ”

“ Frequently the wheels of a carriage would crunch along on the other side of the high wall, at times faint distant whistles would sound from the lake, and less frequently human voices would ring into the garden from the road along the bank. ”

“ The highway is irrelevant. The highway is slipshod. The highway is as the necklace of a gipsy or an Indian, a savage string of pebbles and precious stones, no two alike, with an occasional trumpery suspender button or peach seed. Every diamond is in the rough.
I was walking between rugged farms on the edge of the oil country in western Pennsylvania. ”

“ In an ordinary road is the impression of the wheel of a Stage Coach upon the solid surface of the road so great as to make the injury apparent every time the Carriage passes over it?—It is apparent to me, because wherever there is a mark upon the road there is a consequent injury. ”

“ Have you used your Carriages on pavements?—Yes; never to run continually on a pavement, but to run in and out of towns.
Do they run easier on pavements than on ordinary roads?—Yes; they only take about a quarter the power on a pitched pavement ”

“ Our road lay for a time along the sea, and then inland, always mounting up into the heart of the mountains, by long, green valleys and over desolate plateaux where flocks of sheep and goats grazed under the guardianship of wild-looking shepherds and fierce dogs, the latter violently resenting the intrusion of the car into their fastnesses. ”

“ Finally, our advice is, in extended driving, keep to the main highway, with miles of woodsy driving every day, as fascinating as any Lovers’ Lane, with ponds and lakes innumerable, and occasional cascades so near that the roaring keeps one awake all night. ”

“ A carriage was standing just outside the arch—an ordinary-looking close carriage, drawn by a light-colored horse, and driven by a coachman who was singularly muffled up, considering the heat of the night. The Doctor mechanically noticed that there were no lamps to the carriage, as, in obedience to the eager pressure of his companion's hand, he got in. ”

“ On the pavement cabs and busses rattled past in endless succession; and elegant carriages, drawn swiftly by spirited horses and carrying the princes of trade and of birth, and veiled ladies, who might be actresses or countesses, for all one could tell, rolled smoothly along. ”

“ The ascent of the river by train is indeed one of the great curiosities of the country, and it will be done generally in this way till the authorities of the department undertake to drive a carriage-road up the gorge. ”

“ And be it further enacted, That all parts of the road which the President shall direct to be made, in case the trees are standing, shall be cleared the whole width of four rods; and the road shall be raised in the middle of the carriageway with stone, earth, or gravel and sand, or a combination of some or all of them, leaving or making, as the case may be, a ditch or water course on each side and contiguous to said carriageway, and in no instance shall there be an elevation in said road, when finished, greater than an angle of five degrees with the horizon. ”