om's house had been sightless, with blue blinds drawn down inside
the plate glass windows. And the yellow stone itself was not so yellow as
it once had been, but had now the appearance of soiled manilla wrapping
paper, with black streaks here and there where the soot had run. The new
Dwyer house was of grey stone, Georgian and palatial, with a
picture-gallery twice the size of the old one; a magnificent and fitting
pioneer in a new city of palaces.

Westward the star of Empire--away from the smoke. The Dwyer mansion, with
its lawns and gardens and heavily balustraded terrace, faced the park
that stretched away like a private estate to the south and west. That
same park with its huge trees and black forests that was Ultima Thule in
Honora's childhood; in the open places there had been real farms and
hayricks which she used to slide down with Peter while Uncle Tom looked
for wild flowers in the fields. It had been separated from the city in
those days by an endless country road, like a Via Claudia stretching
towards mysterious Germanian forests, and it was deemed a feat for Peter
to ride thither on his big-wheeled bicycle. Forest Park was the country,
and all that the country represented in Honora's childhood. For Uncle Tom
on a summer's day to hire a surrey at Braintree's Livery Stable and drive
thither was like--to what shall that bliss be compared in these days when
we go to Europe with indifference?

And now Lindell Road--the Via Claudia of long, ago--had become Lindell
Boulevard, with granitoid sidewalks. And the dreary fields through which
it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense Victorian,
and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the artistic.
The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared, and you
could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille that
surrounded the Dwyer grounds. Westward the star!

Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the
second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer. Soot had killed
the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away;
asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the
sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom's roses looked as though they might
advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in
Wonderland. Honora should have lived in the Dwyers' mansion-people who
are capable of judging said so. People who saw her at the garden pa