Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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When I was a child it took a long while to get anywhere, if you started from Wickford Point. When Charles, the black mustachioed French Canadian coachman, used to hitch my grandfather's bay pair to the light phaeton, it took an hour and a half of good smart trotting to get to town. That innovation, the trolley car, was just appearing, and occasionally as a treat we were taken on it for a ride. To reach the carline, it was necessary to take a walk of nearly half an hour, first through the east orchard, then through the lower pasture, then through the white pine grove, then through the swamp wood lot, and thence across Bowles's field, where the bull was, and through the Teach farm. You waited by the Teach stone wall for the trolley car, because it would stop at a white post across the main road. It was generally necessary to wait for quite a while. You could hear the car a mile away on the hill by the Newell farm; then the sound would die away as it stopped at Hoskins turnout; then there would be a hissing of the wires, and it would finally appear, reeling drunkenly on its uneven rails. That memory now is almost archæological, for those country trolley lines, which were once considered such a prime investment, are now as extinct as the bustle. Yet Professor Edward Channing once said in a school history of the United States that the trolley car was the most useful of all inventions, since it brought so much pleasure and freedom to so many people. What is the use in trying, if the history books are wrong?