meburg is exactly seven miles from
the nearest stream that is navigable by a duck. We used to walk out to
that stream Saturday mornings, spend four hours building a dam and then
swim painfully on our elbows and knees in the puddle we had made until
dark, but Shinner wouldn't go in. He was a regular young Goethals when
it came to dam building, but he abhorred water, especially behind the
ears.

Back of my generation the batting average was just about as good. It
seemed to have been the fashion of Homeburg boys of thirty years ago to
go out and run Nebraska politically. Two governors and a representative
have come from our town. If we had them here now, we wouldn't have to
fight so desperately to get a county surveyor or coroner on the ticket
every four years. Samuel P. Wiggins, who now lives in a stone hut
covering an acre in Chicago and owns a flock of flour mills, was once
Sam Wiggins, who bought grain in our town and married the daughter of
one of our most reliable washerwomen. She comes back occasionally now,
and we can't see but that she's as nice as she used to be when she
hauled our family wash home in a little wagon every Saturday night.
Being rich hasn't hurt her at all, though it has spoiled her figure
beyond the utmost and most heartrending efforts of her clothes to
conceal.

Then there's Mrs. Maysworth. When she comes down from Chicago for a
visit, the old town fairly hums for a month. We pick up our interest in
art and woman's suffrage and cheap trips to Europe and Dante's
_Inferno_; the Shakespeare Club is revived, the bookstore sells its copy
of Browning, and the tone of the afternoon teas goes up about two
hundred per cent. Mrs. Maysworth was the ruling spirit of a little bunch
of prosperous Homeburg people who lived at the end of Milk Street--we
used to call it the cream end of Milk Street. When they were with us,
Homeburg was called the Athens of the Steenth Congressional District. We
heard singers and lecturers, who jumped towns of fifty thousand on
either side of us. We had state presidents of Women's Federations and
Church Societies. We had a free library before Mr. Carnegie had a bank
account. North Milk Street established it, and every Saturday afternoon
the muddy feet of the tough south side kids scuffled over Mrs.
Maysworth's hardwood floors, the first west of Chicago, while their
owners drew out books, the said library being located in an extinct
conservatory, which protruded from the house li