"The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of
mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before
steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To
travel in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar
with inns along the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the
bar, to chuck the pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the
delight of men who were young not very long ago. The road was an
institution, the ring was an institution. Men rallied around
them; and, not without a kind of conservatism expatiated on the
benefits with which they endowed the country, and the evils which
would occur when they should be no more decay of British spirit,
decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed of horses, and so forth
and so forth. To give and take a black eye was not unusual nor
derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the enjoyment,
the emulation, of generous youth. Is there any young fellow of
the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One
sees occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely
driver. Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling
Quicksilver, O swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger
and swifter than you. Your lamps are out, and the music of your
horns has died away.

Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which
is thus lamented there lay potent economic forces and a strong
commercial rivalry between different parts of the country. The
Atlantic States were all rivals of each other, reaching out by
one bold stroke after another across forest, mountain, and river
to the gigantic and fruitful West. Step after step the inevitable
conquest went on. Foremost in time marched the sturdy