us,
but could not have any very valuable knowledge of the prospects for
commercial prosperity.

That we were in the midst of an era of the most wonderful commercial
prosperity none denied. How could they? The streets, so lately bordered
with low stores, hotels, and banks, were now craggy with tall office
buildings and great hostelries, through which the darting elevators shot
hurrying passengers. Those trees which made early twilight in the
streets that night when Alice, Jim, and I first rode out to the Trescott
farm were now mostly cut down to make room for "improvements."

Brushy Creek gorge was no longer dark and cool, with its double sky-line
of trees drowsing toward one another, like eyelashes, from the friendly
cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water
from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels,
but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout.
On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such
things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside
ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of
flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs,
in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and the fiends of
dynamite and nitro-glycerin. Limekilns burned all the time, turning the
companionable gray ledges into something offensive and corrosive. One
must now board a street-car, and ride away beyond Lynhurst Park before
one could find the good and pure little Brushy Creek of yore.

The dwellers in the houses which stood in their lawns of vivid green had
gone away into the new "additions," to be in the fashion, and to escape
from the smoke and clang of engine and factory. Their old houses were
torn away, or converted, by new and incongruous extensions, into cheap
boarding-houses. Only the Lattimore house kept faith with the past, and
stood as of old, in its five acres of trees and grass, untouched of the
fever for platting and subdivision, its very skirts drawn up from the
asphalt by austere retaining-walls. And here went on the preparation for
the time when Laura and Clifford were to stand up and declare their
purposes and intentions with reference to each other. The first wedding
this was to be, in all our close-knit circle.

"I am glad," said I, "that they are all so sensible as not to permit
rivalries to breed discord among us. It might be disast