glancing
into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She
was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called
Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego:

Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of
artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with
an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic
shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of
shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds,
and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for
"women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in
the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of
prescriptions.

From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon,"
gilt on black sand.

A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace."
Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love."

Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe
bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red
crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted.
Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the
Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons.

Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood.

A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of
it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go.

A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across
the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale
beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty
songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a
mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting
on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and
ready to start home.

A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking
dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat
prostitutes in striped bathing-suits.

A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog
toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new,
flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks.

The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The
first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly