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Updated: June 1, 2025
Whither went all the tourists and pedlars with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing downward and ever renewed from above? Even the wind blew oftener down the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall.
The streets were encumbered with vehicles of every kind carts, barouches, barrows with horses loosely tethered, with the wounded who lay about on litters of straw along the edges of the pavement, in doorways, under archways in the centre of open places, with crowds of weeping women and crying children wandering aimlessly from place to place trying to find the loved one who might be lying here, hurt or mayhap dying.
One scene had a persistent witchery: She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man.
A band of dark-complexioned musicians, clad in red trousers, black waistcoats heavily embroidered in sombre colors, and round fur caps, played odd airs upon the deck; while bevies of laughing women, almost all pretty in their light summer gowns, alighted from coupes and barouches, descended the flight of steps leading to the river, and crossed the plank to the boat, with little coquettish graces and studied raising of the skirts, allowing ravishing glimpses of pretty feet and ankles.
Within certain limits accumulation in one place represents denudation elsewhere. "And thus, under the stimulus of shallow vanity," I continued, "a rivalry of barouches and bonnets an emulation of waste and extravagance all the powers of the minds of men are turned not to lift up the world, but to degrade it.
There were no smart fellows, whom fortune had tumbled from the seat of their barouches no plucked pigeons or winged rooks no disappointed speculators no ruined miners in short, no one worth talking to. The society of the island was limited to the natives themselves, and a few merchants, who lived by contraband trade.
A tall figure stepp'd out of the centre of these barouches, paus'd leisurely on the sidewalk, look'd up at the granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn'd round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds.
A funeral last evening, nearly at sunset, a coffin of a boy about ten years old laid on a one-horse wagon among some straw, two or three barouches and wagons following. The grave was dug on the steep slope of a hill; and the grave-digger was waiting there, and two or three other shirt-sleeved yeomen, leaning against the trees.
It will, of course, be supposed, that the ladies of the country assembled to witness this gallant strife, those excepted who held the stricter tenets of puritanism, and would therefore have deemed it criminal to afford countenance to the profane gambols of the malignants. Landaus, barouches, or tilburies, there were none in those simple days.
They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches.
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