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A faint, golden, metallic rim appears in the east where the sun is rising. The city is beginning to stir; already can be heard an occasional distant rumble of trucks rolling into the streets from the country, large farm-wagons heavily loaded with supplies for the markets with hay and meat and cordwood.
I remember when "relatives" rode miles and miles in springless farm-wagons to visit cousins, taking the whole family and staying two nights and a day; when books were things to be read; when the beaver and the buffalo were not extinct; when wild pigeons came in clouds that shadowed the sun; when steamboats ran on the Sangamon; when Bishop Simpson preached; when Hell was a place, not a theory, and Heaven a locality whose fortunate inhabitants had no work to do; when Chicago newspapers were ten cents each; when cotton cloth was fifty cents a yard, and my shirt was made from a flour-sack, with the legend, "Extra XXX," across my proud bosom, and just below the words in flaming red, "Warranted Fifty Pounds!"
All that was sad and helpless was dragged that morning into the daylight. All that had been decently cared for in quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled out upon the pavement and jolted along in farm-wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But even with the sick and the very old there was no lamentation.
But long before the appointed time the people who dine at twelve, and never take an afternoon nap, began to arrive, on foot, in farm-wagons, smart buggies, mud-crusted carryalls, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles.
They went in spring-wagons, in farm-wagons, in buggies, and on horseback, starting early in the morning, and taking an ample supply of provisions for themselves as well as feed for their horses. The sunshine poured down hot upon them, and there was much dust, but they were happy.
As there were no caissons for these four guns, farm-wagons were used, into which boxes of ammunition, together with chests containing rations for the men, were loaded. In addition to friction-primers of modern invention at that time for firing cannon, the old-time "slow matches" and "port-fires" were in stock.
Thus it came about that there was to be seen the curious contrast of staring Yankee frame houses and a regulation "meeting-house" peeping over the orange-groves of Jaffa. Yankee-built farm-wagons passed along the dusty cactus-hedged lanes in company with panniered donkeys and laden camels, while Yankee forms and voices were daily seen and heard in the filthy narrow streets of the old town itself.
As they neared Sudleigh town, the road grew populous with carriages and farm-wagons, "step and step," not all from Tiverton way, but gathered in from the roads converging here. Men were walking up and down the market street, crying their whips, their toy balloons, and a multitude of cheaper gimcracks. "Forty miles from home! forty miles from home!" called one, more imaginative than the rest.
They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.
The wide yard lay yonder before him, bathed in the light of the moon; the big farm-wagons, which were ranged in a row before the stables, stood there in black outline; a white cat crept along the garden fence; everything else lay in deep sleep. He walked on along the fence. On the ash-heap behind the forge lay some fragments of glimmering coals, which looked in the darkness like burning eyes.
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