New villages had sprung up here and there, while
already more than one manufacturing establishment showed the Northern
tendencies; and the elements of progress peeped from every settlement,
in the shape of meeting- and school-houses.
When the driver whipped up his modest team to an animated trot before
the Eagle Hotel in Walton, Swan felt as if he must have been in a dream
only, and had just now awakened. Walton was one of those New-Hampshire
towns, of which there came afterwards to be many, which were said "to be
good to go _from_"; accordingly, everybody had gone everywhere, except
the old inhabitants and the children. All the youths had gone towards
"the pleasant Ohio, to settle on its banks"; and such maidens as had
courage to face a pioneer settlement followed their chosen lords,
while the less enterprising were fain to stay at home and bewail
their singlehood. All business was necessarily stagnant, and all the
improvements, architectural or otherwise, which had marked the route on
which Swan had come, now seemed suddenly to have ceased. He might have
thought Walton the Enchanted Palace, and himself the Fairy-Prince that
was to waken to life and love the Sleeping Beauty.
How unchanged was everything! The store where he used to sell crockery
and pins,--the great elm-tree in front of it,--the old red tavern on the
hill, where they had the Thanksgiving ball,--the houses, from one end of
the street to the other, all just as when he left: he might have found
his way in the dark to every one of them.
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