in those days for offenses scarce more heinous than the use of such a devil's trap as a gaudy sedan chair. Even in 1687, nearly fifty years afterward, the first horse coaches which appeared in Boston were severely frowned upon as contrivances fit for this world only, and their brazen owners were subjected to scorn and derision. But the shameless proprietors of those first vehicles found in the possession of them a solace that was sufficient recompense even for social ostracism. And, sad to relate, others of sufficient wealth were also tempted and fell. The use of horses and coaches continued, and slowly increased. Satan was triumphant.

Outside the towns and their immediate neighborhoods the utility of the first coaches was very limited indeed. Roads were scarcely worthy of the name, and there were no bridges. When a coach came to a stream too deep to be forded it was stood upon its wheels in two parallel canoes, and thus conveyed across. The horses swam.

There were three types of the earliest American wheeled vehicles. One was patterned after the heavy and cumbrous two-horse family carriage that had just come into limited use in England. The others were better adapted to conditions in such new country, and each was drawn by one horse. The first of the Americanized types was called a chair, and the other a chaise. The chair was a two-wheeled vehicle with a seat for two, and sometimes with an additional small seat, almost over the shafts, for the driver. Of this carriage the Canadian caleche was a variety. The chaise was simply a chair with a covered top of leather. None of the earliest specimens had springs, but swung on stout braces of wood or leather that somewhat alleviated the constant jolting. All were made by local blacksmiths and wheelwrights, some of whom built up

reputations by the excellence of their work and thus became the first carriage makers of the country. There was not much change in the three types of vehicles for a hun

15.-The first wheeled vehicles to appear were a few private coaches, made in the large towns for town use only, late in the seventeenth century. The condition of the roads did not permit their employment elsewhere. A dozen or so vehicles like this existed in Boston, Philadelphia and New York before 1700. They had bodies either of wood or leather and were generally painted in bright colors.

dred years or more, except that they gradually became more ornate in their outward aspect. All through the colonies a tendency toward the use of brighter and still brighter colors, both for personal wear and for application to miscellaneous belongings was apparent for a long time. This trait of the people reached its climax shortly before the days of the Revolution. Its effect on vehicles was seen. in their brightly-painted wheels, their bodies of red, yellow, blue or brown, with panels of different hues and trimmings to match. Especially was this craving for warmth of color observable in the middle and southern colonies. And it must have been a dazzling sight to see such equi

gowns

pages in a festal hour with the women in white satin and filmy shoulder veils of purple or emerald green, beside men in lace ruffles, blue coats, yellow waistcoats, knee breeches of buff, scarlet stockings and silver buckles.

Philadelphia possessed about thirty carts and other wheeled vehicles in 1697, and New York also had a number, but the introduction of such things did not proceed with any uniformity throughout the country. In Connecticut, for instance, there were no carriages until about 1750 and few until after the Revolution. When Governor Trumbull of Connecticut visited the town of Norwich during the Revolution he travelled in a chaise, and the people of the village abandoned their affairs with one accord and flocked to behold such an extraordinary contraption. No vehicles were used, or any travelling performed on Sunday in some of the colonies until after the era of independence began. It was prohibited by law. Sunday, by the statutes, commenced at sunset of Saturday and continued until the same time on the Sabbath. On one occasion a man who was about to resume his horseback journey left his tavern on Sunday evening, stood beside the animal and patiently waited until the sun had retired, as he thought, for the night. Then he mounted and rode away. But a moment later one last brief gleam of sunlight broke for an instant from behind the clouds and was spied by a vigilant constable. The traveller was arrested and fined.

Much travelling by land was performed in the winter. During the spring, summer-time and autumn, particularly in the northern colonies, a large part of the population was busy in the work necessary to an agricultural, land-clearing and seafaring community. But winter was the time for recreation and visiting, and for making journeys to

towns where markets could be found for the sale of such commodities as the farmer and his family had produced. In winter the roads of the middle and northern colonies were no longer seas of mud with archipelagos of stumps, but were made smooth and firm with a pavement spread upon them from the sky. The smaller streams and rivers, too, were turned to highways of ice and were often used. Sleighs of various crude and simple types appeared at an early date, and by the year 1700 were in general use. One of the commonest varieties of these vehicles for winter

16.-American colonial sleds were generally called either pungs or pods, though the Canadian cariole was also used. The pungs and pods ordinarily had an open space between the bed of the sled and its runners. Each American type also had a shelf-like extension of the floor beyond its sides for its whole length. Horse-drawn sleds preferred to travel on the smooth surfaces of frozen streams when possible.

travel was an idea adopted1 from Canada. The Canadians spoke of it as a cariole, but the people of New England, who have always preferred to use home-made names for

1 With alterations.

things, called a sleigh either a pung or a pod, and found it just as serviceable. They were more concerned with features of utility than with melodious nomenclature. A pung was drawn by two horses; a pod by one. When loaded and equipped for a long journey over the snows a pung must have been an interesting spectacle. In the body of the vehicle sat the farmer's wife, with maybe a child or two, all of them bundled up with coats, blankets, hoods, mittens and mufflers against the sharp air. Around them were heaped the things they had prepared for sale

- cheeses, dried herbs, bundles of knitted stockings and mittens, parcels of vegetables, mysterious jugs, flax, and all those other primitive commodities of domestic growth or manufacture until the whole outfit looked like a miniature mountain on runners. As for the man himself, he trotted alongside. There was no room for him on board. And to the side of every departing pung, as the chiefest part of its equipment for a journey, there was securely tied a huge round chunk of frozen porridge (bean porridge, of course) and a hatchet with which to chop off a chunk of it when any of the travellers might feel the need of nourishment.

No doubt this curious commissary department of an early New England sleigh throws a certain light on that famous old nursery rhyme that runs:

"Bean porridge hot; bean porridge cold;

Bean porridge in the pot, nine days old."

Preliminary to every such trip, and a few days before it, the housewife would cook a big pot of porridge and then, setting it out-of-doors in the kettle, would allow it to ripen and freeze while awaiting the time for the journey to begin. There is no present way of finding out whether the epicures of that period considered nine days