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The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people along its obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins’s story where the bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me think more of Miss Jewett’s people. The shore folk and the Down-Easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’, or ‘Sister Wisby’s Courtship’, or ‘Dulham Ladies’, or ‘An Autumn Ramble’, or twenty other entrancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself.

The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in an effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the country road which it followed. It is a land of low hills, broken by frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. It scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. Its course does not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but as yet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one would think. The landscape has already accepted it, and is making the best of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. It passes everybody’s front door or back door, and the farmers can get themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth in an hour, twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of wind or rain. In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let a car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out in a blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. “But the cah was so wa’m, I neva suff’ed a mite.”

“Well,” I summarized, “it must be a great advantage to all the people along the line.”

“Well, you wouldn’t ‘a’ thought so, from the kick they made.”

“I suppose the cottagers”–the summer colony–“didn’t like the noise.”

“Oh yes; that’s what I mean. The’s whe’ the kick was. The natives like it. I guess the summa folks ‘ll like it, too.”

He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow to the will of the majority.