Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/143

thing connected with federal affairs which had grown up under the late administration, but more largely to the difficulties and uncertainties of the means of travelling, not only in the more inaccessible parts of the country but even in the most populous states and on the chief routes connecting the larger towns.

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, the well known author of the History of New Hampshire, and several other works, which secured to him a high reputation among literary men in America at the close of the last century, had apprenticed one of his sons to Robert Aitkin, a printer of magazines and books, in Philadelphia. He sat out from his home, in Dover, to visit his son, and see the world, and the adventures he encountered illustrate in an interesting manner the delays and vexations of travel at that time. From Boston, on the twenty-seventh, he wrote back to his wife, "I am disappointed of my intended journey to Providence, by the means of a set of English factors, or something else, who, after I had engaged a passage for myself in the coach, went and hired the whole of it to themselves, and the base fellow of a coachman shut me out. Your brother is vexed on the occasion as much as myself. Another coach is expected in this evening, and I have laid in for a place in it; but as these stages do not go on any fixed day, but only as they find company, I may be detained here till Thursday: however, I have time enough before me — the whole month of October — at the end of which I hope to see you again." As the worthy pastor anticipated, or hoped rather, the stage-coach was again ready on Thursday morning, and he took a place in it for Providence; but the illness of a "lady passenger" compelled them to pass the night at Hatch's Tavern, in Attleborough, so that they did not reach Providence till the next day. On the following Tuesday he sailed in a packet for Newport, having been detained by squally weather, and in that place was compelled to wait, for a favorable wind