The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-04-24

could he do? Four days later Walter Lawless appeared at the county clerk s
 office to redeem the property. It origi- nally had belonged to him. His two hundred acre farm adjoins it on the east.
 Do you suppose I'd let that land go for .fifty-seven do1lars?" he inquired of MT. Mann, It's worth seventy-five dollars an acre"
 Why didn't you pay the etxes, then?' ~'
 MT. Lawless didn't say, but it cost him considerable more than $5729 to se- cure clear title.
 Ten years ago the village of Tracy was thriving settlement, covering an are ofa thirty acres. Deserted when the vein of coal that was it's sole excuse gave out, the village houses rotted and furnished lumber and fuel to neighbor- ing farmers for years. Sold for taxes, the town site passed into the hands of a carpenter, who disposed of it few days thereafter to the farmer whose land it adjoins. Next year corn fields win ob- literate the last traces of a town where several hundred people formerly toiled and lived
 Take the Kankakee and Seneca branch of the Big Four railroad, ride out northwest from Kankakee on a go- as-you-please mixed train, and at the end of about twenty miles you come to the town of Essex. Hire rig at an ex- orbitant rate and drive west for a cou- pie of miles until you strike an unused coal road that is marked Illinois Cen tral on the map. Then go south for quarter of mile on a highway that has not been disturbed by wheels for years, Looking sharply about you now, you can see traces of former town. It is the site of the abandoned Tracy There are no imposing ruins, such as one might encounter in the valley of the Nile or In the grand canon of the Colorado. This Is a deserted mining town and deserted mining towns in this country are of a uperlatively evanescent character.
 Doubly melancholy is the forgotten hamlet shrouded in the deep snow. It is like the neglected grave of first wife-supplanted for the more lively, younger town of Clarke City one mile further south, on the coal road that has been mentioned.
 Here, 1t is easy to see, was once a wide street, and on both sides at t'inter- vals are found excavations where rude cellars existed. Mansions were not found in Tracey, Remains of former foundation, robbed of it's best dimen- sion stone, show where house of some cip etan Il, lived. A dilapldated fence, overlooked by kindling wood gatherers must have at one time guard ed kitchen garden from wandering and unscrupulous cows
 The most conspicuous feature of the gloomy landscape is a huge hill of slack, many times larger than the dust heap that Dickens describes in "Our Mutual Friend.' It is near the mouth of the abandoned mine, and will stand there till some ingenious American dis covers process for converting what is now considered waste material into | building blocks and paving brick. | Then the owner will be in a position to | buy more land and raise more corn.
 Any buildings. standing? Yes, ane | l floor. In it are the charred remnants of | l recent hunters fire and bits of fur that need no Sherlock Holmes to assist l in conveying the information that | sportsmen fingered here to satisfy hun | ger by dining on one of the rabbits ! whose tracks are so numerous in this | depressing place. Henry David Tho 'eau, hermit though he was, would not nave remained an hour in this lonely {, "a bin, and Cowper, despite his plain i've signing for a Hodge in some vast | wilderness" would have taken look | 1t the place and fled, nor cast one Tong | lingering look behind" No living thing | here, save crows, and they finding | to tempt their voracious appe- ties, flying circuitously westward, 'awng impatiently: Come on, come m, come on!'
 Ten years ago there was a different cene. Perhaps one hundred homes modest structures such as miners occu-