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Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to note one so common and observable as that middle-aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the one vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, blind and deaf to all the modest beckonings and benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air as of better days clings about her; she seems a person who has known sickness and sorrow; but so far from pitying her, you view her with inexpressible rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit down, and that she will not. But for a point of honor the conductor would show her the vacant place; this forbidding, however, how can he? There she stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as you must from time to time, and no wild turkey caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking down than this middle-aged (shall I say also unmarried?) lady.

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater- cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made an example of.

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-car an advocate of one of the great reforms of the day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and without any notice passed from a question of crops to a discussion of suffrage for the negro, and so to womanhood suffrage. “Let the women vote,” said he,–“let ’em vote if they want to. I don’t care. Fact is, I should like to see ’em do it the first time. They’re excitable, you know; they’re excitable;” and he enforced his analysis of female character by thrusting his elbow sharply into my side. “Now, there’s my wife; I’d like to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. And the girls,–Lord, the girls! Circus wouldn’t be anywhere.” Enchanted with the picture which he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin, “You see,” he went on, “I go out playing for dancing-parties. Work all day at my trade,–I’m a carpenter,–and play in the evening. Take my little old ten dollars a night. And I notice the women a good deal; and I tell you they’re all excitable, and I sh’d like to see ’em vote. Vote right and vote often,–that’s the ticket, eh?” This friend of womanhood suffrage–whose attitude of curiosity and expectation seemed to me representative of that of a great many thinkers on the subject–no doubt was otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man would not drink wine–if he could find whiskey. At least I should have said so, guessing from the odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments.

Something of the character of a college-town is observable nearly always in the presence of the students, who confound certain traditional ideas of students by their quietude of costume and manner, and whom Padua or Heidelberg would hardly know, but who nevertheless betray that they are banded to–

“Scorn delights and live laborious days,”

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a clannishness of cane or scarf, or a talk of boats and base-ball held among themselves. One cannot see them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no wonder that their young-lady acquaintances brighten so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is much good fortune in the world, but none better than being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale, handsome, fashionably dressed, with the whole promise of life before: it’s a state of things to disarm even envy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old: the generations arise and pass away but in her veins is still this tide of warm blood, century in and century out, so much the same from one age to another that it would be hardy to say it was not still one youthfulness. There is a print of the village as it was a cycle since, showing the oldest of the college buildings and upon the street in front a scholar in his scholar’s-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish girl of that period, who is dressed wonderfully like the girl of ours, so that but for the student’s antique formality of costume, one might believe that he was handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no horse-car in the picture,–that is the only real difference between then and now in our Charlesbridge, perennially young and gay. Have there not ever been here the same grand ambitions, the same high hopes,–and is not the unbroken succession of youth in these?