cost seven or eight thousand dollars to build, and people with
that much money to invest in such comforts were classified as the Rich.
They paid the inhabitant of "the girl's room" two dollars a week, and,
in the latter part of this period, two dollars and a half, and finally
three dollars a week. She was Irish, ordinarily, or German or it might
be Scandinavian, but never native to the land unless she happened to be
a person of colour. The man or youth who lived in the stable had like
wages, and sometimes he, too, was lately a steerage voyager, but much
oftener he was coloured.

After sunrise, on pleasant mornings, the alleys behind the stables were
gay; laughter and shouting went up and down their dusty lengths, with
a lively accompaniment of curry-combs knocking against back fences and
stable walls, for the darkies loved to curry their horses in the alley.
Darkies always prefer to gossip in shouts instead of whispers; and
they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is almost worthless.
Horrible phrases were caught by early rising children and carried to
older people for definition, sometimes at inopportune moments; while
less investigative children would often merely repeat the phrases in
some subsequent flurry of agitation, and yet bring about consequences so
emphatic as to be recalled with ease in middle life.

They have passed, those darky hired-men of the Midland town; and the
introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably
cursed--those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more. For
all their seeming permanence they might as well have been buffaloes--or
the buffalo laprobes that grew bald in patches and used to slide from
the careless drivers' knees and hang unconcerned, half way to the
ground. The stables have been transformed into other likenesses, or
swept away, like the woodsheds where were kept the stove-wood and
kindling that the "girl" and the "hired-man" always quarrelled over: who
should fetch it. Horse and stable and woodshed, and the whole tribe of
the "hired-man," all are gone. They went quickly, yet so silently that
we whom they served have not yet really noticed that they are vanished.

So with other vanishings. There were the little bunty street-cars on the
long, single track that went its troubled way among the cobblestones.
At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but a step where
passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad and the ca