File:Our church and our village (1899) (14596476117).jpg

Identifier: ourchurchourvill00birch (find matches)
Title: Our church and our village
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Birch, George W. F., b. 1837
Subjects: Hoge, Thomas, 1775-1846 Claysville Presbyterian Church
Publisher: New York : Ward & Drummond
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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thing for a person on the threshold of active life togather from her treasury of recollections eye and earimpressions of the men who were leaders when forensicpower was a potent factor in the legislative hall, andthe cunning of the orator a prevailing power in politicalcampaigns. Of course a boy would be interested in the names ofthe stage-coaches which once thronged the old pike.Every State of the Union was represented in the Na-tional Road Stage Company. Its rival, the GoodIntent Line, took a wider range in its coach nomen-clature. With my pen in hand, I look across fiftyyears and find the names which a little boy was wont toread as the coach rushed by, standing out plainly anddistinctly on the tablet of memory. And I spell outthis moment the coach titles: Granite State, Bay State,Buckeye State, Keystone State. I became familiarwith the great men of the day as the big letters whichmade Rough and Ready, at once suggested GeneralTaylor; as the stage register enrolled General Cass, 126
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Our Village Home Colonel Benton, and Henry Clay. I was introducedto every phase of fancy in the use of the names Fash-ion, Pathfinder, Ivanhoe, Industry, and Chancellor. Itook lessons in geography, as I pronounced Yucatan,Tampico, Buena Vista, Ashland, Raritan, and Panama. Oh, I am a boy again as, moved by the absorbingambition to be a stage-driver, it was my habit with thetouch of imagination to change billets of wood intohorses, and turning the wood-pile into a stage-mount,my ideal box, pick up the ropes and spliced strapswhich were my ideal reins, and cracking my real whip,shout to the near leader, make a dexterous cut at theoff leader, and lean over to strike the right and leftwheel, and throwing out my improvised mail at thevisionary post-offices along the route, thus ride by thehour, on the wings of fancy, over the road from myhome to the county seat. And it is the boy in me now which makes me wishfor the pen with which Charles Dickens, in MartinChuzzlewit, describes Tom Pinchs

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