The Toll Gatherer's Day

A Sketch of Transitory Life.

Methinks, for a person whose instinct bids him rather to pore over the
current of life, than to plunge into its tumultuous waves, no
undesirable retreat were a toll-house beside some thronged thoroughfare
of the land. In youth, perhaps, it is good for the observer to run
about the earth, to leave the track of his footsteps far and wide,--
to mingle himself with the action of numberless vicissitudes,--and,
finally, in some calm solitude, to feed a musing spirit on all that lie
has seen and felt. But there are natures too indolent, or too
sensitive, to endure the dust, the sunshine, or the rain, the turmoil of
moral and physical elements, to which all the wayfarers of the world
expose themselves. For such a mail, how pleasant a miracle, could life
be made to roll its variegated length by the threshold of his own
hermitage, and the great globe, as it were, perform its revolutions and
shift its thousand scenes before his eyes without whirling him onward in
its course. If any mortal be favored with a lot analogous to this, it is
the toll-gatherer. So, at least, have I often fancied, while lounging
on a bench at the door of a small square edifice, which stands between
shore and shore in the midst of a long bridge. Beneath the timbers ebbs
and flows an arm of the sea; while above, like the life-blood through a
great artery, the travel of the north and east is continually throbbing.
Sitting on the aforesaid bench, I amuse myself with a conception,
illustrated by numerous pencil-sketches in the air, of the toll-
gatherer's day.

In the morning--dim, gray, dewy summer's morn the distant roll of
ponderous wheels begins to mingle with my old friend's slumbers, creaking
more and more harshly through the midst of his dream, and gradually
replacing it with realities. Hardly conscious of the change from sleep
to wakefulness, he finds himself partly clad and throwing wide the toll-
gates for the passage of a fragrant load of hay. The timbers groan
beneath the slow-revolving wheels; one sturdy yeoman stalks beside the
oxen, and, peering from the summit of the hay, by the glimmer of the
half-extinguished lantern over the toll-house, is seen the drowsy visage
of his comrade, who has enjoyed a nap some ten miles long. The toll is
paid,--creak, creak, again go the wheels, and the huge haymow vanishes
into the morning mist. As yet, nature is but half awake, and familiar
objects appear visionary. But yonder, dashing from the shore with a
rattling thunder of the wheels and a confused clatter of hoofs, comes the
never-tiring mail, which has hurried onward at the same headlong,
restless rate, all through the quiet night. The bridge resounds in one
continued peal as the coach rolls on without a