From A Victorian Village by Lizette Woodworth Reese published in 1929
A half mile away from the old house stood the toll-gate, which was opened at a certain time in the morning, and closed at a certain time each night. The money taken in tolls was expended in paying the keeper, and toward the repair of the road…The tollkeeper himself was a character of avid interest to the elder villagers, and to the younger section a most pictorial individual…could he not hold back from their legitimate journeyings any number of vehicles, until there was handed out to him the proper amount due to the county in their tolls? And did he not at times sally forth at midnight, or very early in the morning with a lantern in his hand, in response to sundry knockings, and bawling, and doubtless curses, to open his gate and allow some traveler to hurry through?…A dark figure standing in the dark, with the toll-house sharp behind him, and the black bulk of the vehicle before him, and beyond the steeple of Saint John's leaping up to the stars…When this part of the county was absorbed by Baltimore City, and taxes were substituted for tolls, and the gates were torn down, something went---as in the case of the omnibus---which would never come again.
When I thought, years after, of the pastures in front of my grandfather's house, a line of one of Watt's hymns---"Green fields beyond the swelling flood"---came into my mind. If as a child, I thought of this line---and I was, as many a child of that period, hymn-rich---then these pastures were my first idea of heaven. There were great trees everywhere about in the village. A huge sycamore in the place next to us, down near the entrance gate, with its spotted, hide-like trunk, its wide, almost spare looking branches, and its rude, definite, pear-green leaves, was a thing to be looked at again and again. Every house had a garden. In the Baden garden, a stone's throw from the tollgate, there had once grown a lot of lavender, and when it blossomed folks had come out of town on Sunday afternoons, and bought bunches of it to put away between their sheets…Altogether it was a green quiet country, with scattered houses, with stretches of orchard and meadow, and although within easy-reaching distance from Baltimore, almost as obscure as though it stood on the edge of a desert. A green, quiet place, well-beloved, and long-remembered…
For the villagers to walk down the York Road in the diminishing yellow light after sunset, and come upon the gypsy camp at Frisby's Woods, was to venture into a different and disquieting world. They crossed the strip of dusty highway, and behold---scarlet and gold and the jangling of bells…To have their fortune told, became as natural a thing as eating a meal. To hold out their hands, and hear a mumble of words and the click of coin afterwards, and to rise up with a sense of dread or elation, when the mumble was over, was all part of an old cousinly game a little tarnished by disuse, perhaps, but as primarily effective as ever…
A short, squat, paunchy man was the proprietor of one of the stores in the village, a land, dark, black-haired man that of the other. One was German, the other of English extraction. These two gentlemen were masters of the entire situation. Town was too distant for casual errands; you bought from them or did without your pound of crackers or ounce of cinnamon or whatever small article was lacking to your kitchen shelves. Each shop was the stereotyped one of the suburban settlement. Each held the same odors. All the spice and sugar, and meal, and vinegar and gin, and bundles of rope, and stack of brooms, and painted buckets, which had been handed over the counters, had made themselves into a smell which became a fixed atmosphere. Each shop had a bar, and in the first there an extension containing a back room, where a thirsty farmer might sit at a whitely scrubbed table, and drink a glass of frothing ale or beer. As to the proprietors themselves, their conduct was all that goes into the making of wise and successful shopkeeping. They were impeccably neutral. Confederate and Federal men, statesrighters and black Republicans might froth and rave about them, but these two were of that stripe of politics which belongs to each and all---the desire to make an honest living and keep away from disaster. Every rag of gossip in the county fluttered to their wide porches and fastened there for the especial gratification of the buyers and loungers. To hear that your neighbor was worse off than yourself was not an altogether unpleasant experience. Death was always interesting, and a guess at the dollars and acres left behind by the deceased a stimulating problem in arithmetic. A birth added to the bucolic population. A marriage brought out all the genealogical resources of the bystanders. Even the sermons preached on Sundays at Saint John's or the Huntingdon Baptist church provided critical meat for those who felt capable of masticating it. And always there were the crops and the weathers. And these two dispensers of groceries, bacon, small drygoods, and liquors, kept to their smooth and trusty neutrality, listened, nodded, lifted mobile eyebrows, said "tschuch" and "You don't tell me" at the proper intervals and at sterile moments contributed an atom to the revolving mass. There was scarcely a household in Waverly, no matter in what obscure and lonely lane, which did not gather to itself some morsel from those tables spread in the village. More than one husband, trudging home too late through the afternoon sunshine, to some mellowed house set in the maze of lilac or syringe bushes, made his peace with the waiting family by a scrap of gossip from the porch of one of the general shops.
We children seldom saw the inside of these lively public places. Except for a rare errand connected with some small ware for the family---the original message almost swamped in the dozen solemn directions accompanying it---we were strangers both to their encompassing odors and the wordily knowingness, which appeared fixed in their atmosphere. The dull hours of the morning or afternoon seemed to be selected for these errands. Sometimes a pleasant affair of our own, such as the buying of a stick of striped candy, or or cornucopia of sweetened anise seeds, took us there…
