e Episcopalians bowed patronizingly to
the Presbyterians, the Presbyterians condescendingly recognized the
Methodists, the Methodists, by a slight inclination of the head,
acknowledged the existence of the Catholics. This done, the excitement
of the day was over.

The footsteps of a chance pedestrian echoed in Main Street like some one
walking in a tunnel. Children flattened their noses against the panes
and looked out wistfully upon a world that had no joy in it.

The gloom of financial depression hung over Prouty like a crepe veil. If
Prouty spent Sunday waiting for Monday, it spent the rest of the week
waiting for something to happen. Prouty's attitude was one of
halfhearted expectancy--like a shipwrecked sailor knowing himself
outside the line of travel, yet unable to resist watching the horizon
for succor.

The Boosters Club still went on boosting, but its schemes for
self-advertisement resembled a defective pin-wheel, which, after the
first whiz, lacks the motive powers to turn further. The motive power in
this instance was money. Prouty wanted money with the same degree of
intensity that the parched Lazarus wanted water.

Real estate owners in Prouty regarded their property without enthusiasm,
for there were few residences not ornamented with a "plaster" in the
form of a mortgage. Abram Pantin's boast that he never "held the sack"
was heard but seldom, for there was more than a reasonable doubt that he
was able to collect the interest on his farm mortgages, to say nothing
of the principal.

The town was at a stage when merely to eat and go on wearing clothes was
cause for self-congratulation. It was conceded that a person who could
exist in Prouty could live anywhere. Its citizens seemed to partake of
the nature of the cactus that, grubbed up and left for dead, always
manages somehow to get its roots down again.

The Prouty _Grit_ still called the attention of the world to the
country's natural resources, but Mr. Butefish's editorials had a hollow
ring, like the "spiel" of the sideshow barker, who talks in anticipation
of a swift kick from a dissatisfied patron.

Major Prouty, who had hoped to die in his boots, picturesquely, had
passed away quietly in his bed with acute indigestion from eating
sour-dough sinkers of his own manufacture. It was cold the day he was
buried, so not many went to the funeral, and the board which had been
put up to mark his grave, until the town could afford a suitable
monument