Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/260

236 Some people now remember the scenes of life and activity that used to be witnessed in the town on the arrival and departure of the stages. Some remember, too, the loud snap of the whip which gave increased speed to the horses, as they dashed up in approved style to the stopping-place, where the loungers were collected to see the travelers and listen to the gossip which fell from their lips. There were no telegraphs then, and but few railroads in the country. The papers did not gather the news so eagerly, nor spread it abroad so promptly, as they do now, and items of intelligence were carried largely by word of mouth.

The earliest line of stage-coaches between Boston and Groton was the one mentioned in The Columbian Centinel, April 6, 1793. The advertisement is headed "New Line of Stages," and gives notice that—

It was probably one of these "Carriages" to which allusion is made in Mr. Winthrop's Memoir of the Honorable Nathan Appleton, as follows:—

At early dusk on some October or November evening, in the year 1794, a fresh, vigorous, bright-eyed lad, just turned of fifteen, might have been seen alighting from a stage-coach near Quaker Lane, as it was then called, in the old town of Boston. He had been two days on the road from his home in the town of New Ipswich, in the State of New Hampshire. On the last of the two days, the stage-coach had brought him all the way from Groton in Massachusetts; starting for that purpose early in the morning, stopping at Concord for the passengers to dine, trundling them through Charlestown about the time the evening lamps were lighted, and finishing the whole distance of rather more than thirty miles in season for supper. For his first day's journey, there had been no such eligible and expeditious conveyance. The Boston stage-coach, in those days, went no farther than Groton in that direction. His father's farm-horse, or perhaps that of one of the neighbors, had served his turn for the first six or seven miles; his little brother of ten years old having followed him as far as Townsend, to ride the horse home again. But from there he had trudged along to Groton on foot, with