110 
TI1E WOOD PAVING. 
equestrian habits and customs, feel himself quite incapable of ac- 
counting for, or reconciling in his mind, this singular incongruity 
of wood pavement and horse usance. He might think, and truly 
think, that the English must be a fool-hardy nation, to pave 
their streets with wood, and run a risk of breaking their own 
necks and their horses’ limbs in riding through them; and yet, 
knowing what hair-breadth escapes Englishmen ride themselves 
into, in steeple -chasing and hunting, it is possible he might 
imagine they had made their streets slippery and dangerous with 
a view of having contentions one with another who could ride 
fastest or safest along them, and particularly in frosty weather. 
He would need to be informed, before he could make up his mind 
to the apparent inconsistency, that the streets are paved by one 
class of people and the horses ridden and driven by another ; and 
farther, that, as the interests of these two parties, so far as the 
paving of the streets with wood went, were at variance, the two 
discordant facts admitted of some reconciliation. The shop- 
keepers, keeping themselves no horses, having no notion whatever 
of riding, nor any of driving, apart from what they happen on a 
Sunday to see while ensconced in a cab or buried in an omnibus, 
but desirous to get rid of that interminable rumbling noise which 
nightly disturbs their slumbers, are, of course, strong advocates for 
wood pavement ; and they, for the most part, being themselves 
the overseers and directors of high-ways and by-ways, find no 
difficulty in carrying their vote against the comparatively few 
street-residents who happen to be horse-owners. Such is the his- 
tory of wood pavements — to say nothing about the interests of 
wood-paving companies, contractors, & c. &c. — and the secret ways 
in which, no doubt, such interests are worked. 
So great was the stir made in the horse- world about the time 
that the wood pavement commenced widely extending its limits, 
that the wood companies, trembling for their occupation, offered a 
high premium to any person who invented a horseshoe suitable 
forgoing upon it without slipping; and one shoe obtained their 
approval and gained its inventor their reward. It does not, how- 
ever, appear to have come much into use, arising, as we believe, 
from the circumstance of the projections or stops upon it soon be- 
coming worn down, as also from the additional expense in- 
curred by its employment. Nor do we think that any shoe, what- 
ever be its other merits, will be generally adopted, unless its stops 
be of a durable description, and the cost be barely that of — or the 
least possible more than — the common shoe. The notion of many 
riders and drivers over the wood pavement is, that their horses, by 
dint of practice, learn to go upon it without slipping, or, at all 
events, without slipping to that degree that horses unaccustomed 
