Camas Prairie chronicle. [volume] (Cottonwood, Idaho) 1901-1917, 1910-12-16

as Jefferson had been seeming the I'M
Wonted in the air Of sleepy Paradise.
once he had stumbled on the engi-
neers at work in the dark woods"
across the creek, spying out line for
the new railroad. Another day he had
come nome late from a fishing excur-
sion to the upper pools to find his faith
er shut in the sitting room with three
strangers respondent in town clothes,
and the talk was of iron and coal, of a
New South" whatever that might be,
and of wonderful changes portending,
which his father was exhorted to HELM
bring about
But these were only the gentle heav-
lngs and crackhgs of the ground pre-
MONETARY of the real earthquake. That
came on day of days when, as a re-
ward of merit for having faultlessly
recited the eighty third Psalm from
memory, he was permitted to go to
town with his father. Behold him, then,
cangling his feet-uncom1ortable be-
cause they were stockinged and shod =
from the high buggy seat while the
laalest of horses ambled between the
shafts up the white pike and around
and over the hunched shoulder of
Mount Lebanon. This in the cool Of
the morning of the day of revelations,
In spite of the premonitory trem-
bl1ngs, the true earthquake, found
Thomas Jefferson totally unprepared.
he had been to town often enough to
nave a clear memory picture of South
Iredegar-the prehistoric South Tired
egar. There was a single street, hub
deep In mud in the rains, beginning
vaguely In the open square surround
ing the venerable courthouse of male
brick and stucco-pillared porticoes.
There were the shops-onIy Thorn as
Jefferson and all his kind called them
stores"-one- stored, these, the wood
en- ones with lying false fronts to hide
the mean little gables; the brick ones
honester in face, but sadly Clipped and
crumbling and dingy with age and the
weather.
Also, on the banks of the river there
was the Anticipated iron-furnace which.
long before the war, had given the
town its pretentious name And last
ly, there was the Calhoun House,
dreariest and most inhospitable inn of
Its kind; and across the muddy street
from it the great echoing train-shed.
ridiculously out of proportion to every
other building in the town, the tavern
not excepted, and to the ramshackle,
once-a-day train that wheezed and
clanked into and out of it.
Thomas Jefferson had seen 1t all,
time and again; and this he remem-
bered, that each time the dead, wealth
er-worn, miry or dusty dullness of it
had crept into his soul, sending him
back to the freshness of the Paradise
fields and forests at eventide with
grateful gladness in his heart.
But now all this was to be forgot
ten, or to be remembered only as q
dream. On the day of revelations the
earlier picture was effaced, BACKED
out. obliterated; and it came to the
boy with pang that he should never
be able to recall it again in it's entire
ty. For the genius of modern progress
is contemptuous of old landmarks and
impatient of delays. And swift as it's
race is elsewhere, it is only in that
part of the South which has become
industrial" that it came as a thunder
clap, with all the intermediate and ac-
CELEBRATED steps taken at a bound. Men
spoke of it as "the BOOM" 1t was not
that. 1t was merely that the spirit
of modernity had discovered a hither-
to overlooked corner of the field, and
made haste to occupy it.
So in South Tredegar, besprent now
before the wondering eyes of a Thorn
as Jefferson. The muddy street had
vanished to give place to a smooth
black roadway, as springy under foot
as a forest path, and as clean as the
pike after a sweeping summer storm.
The shops, with their false fronts and
shabby lean-to awnings, were gone,
or going, and in their room majestic
businesses in brick and cut stone were
rising, by their own might, as it would
seem, out of disorderly mountains Of
building material.
Street. cars, propelled as yet by the
patient mule, tinkIed their bells fnces-
sanity. Smart vehicles of many kinds
strange to Paradise eyes ratified reck-
lessly in and out among the street OBJ
structions. Busting throngs were in
possession of the sidewalks; of the
awe-inspiring restaurant, where they
gave you lemonade in a glass bowl and
some people washed their fingers in
it; of the rotunda of the Marlboro, the
mammoth hotel which had grown up
on the site of the old Calhoun House
distressing crowds and multitudes of
people everywhere.
(Io De conIinued.l