BRIDGES 157 



the entrance a shadowy cave where dust motes danced 

 in the rays which streamed from cracks between the 

 boarding and every detail of the interior, including the 

 smell, are so clear and vivid that I have only to shut my 

 eyes and be five years old again. 



The old New England covered bridge (covered, of 

 course, to protect the traffic from the winter blasts dur- 

 ing the long crossing) had the box-like simplicity of the 

 New England farmhouse and barn. It was made of 

 wood, on stone piers, exactly as the barns and houses 

 were. It was invariably painted red, or else left to 

 weather a soft mouse-gray. It could never have been a 

 seemly approach to a city, yet in its setting of country 

 road and pasture, with the wide, clear, brown river 

 beneath it and the simple, box-like red or gray barns on 

 the distant hills, it not only admirably filled its function 

 of getting the farmer across the wide stream with ears 

 unfrozen in the bitterest storms, but, Winter or Summer, 

 it fitted the landscape. What should theoretically have 

 been angular and clumsy toned into the scheme with a 

 quaint, stiff grace, and threw its red reflection into the 

 water. Wherever such a bridge still stands, connecting 

 communities which retain the simplicity of the old 

 New England, it is a picturesque delight. Wherever 

 such a bridge is reached by a tarvia road, perhaps with 

 a steel trolley span beside it and modern houses on either 

 bank, it is almost pathetically ugly, and, I have dis- 

 covered, does not even retain its characteristic smell. 



