The Connecticut labor press., 1919-09-06

1 much eXerTlO09 m1OQlc age pAayeu euchre.- There was a theater, next door to the Anderson hotel, and when 1 Edwin Booth came for a night every body who could afford to buy a ticket was there, and all the hacks" in town 1 were hired. "The Black Crook" also filled the theater, but the audience then was almost entirely of men, who looked uneasy as they left for home when the final curtain fell upon the shocking girls dressed as fairies. But the theater did not often do so we'll i; the people of the town were still too thrifty.
 They were thrifty because they were the sons or grandsons, of the "early settlers" who had opened the wilder ness and had reached 1t from the East and the South with wagons and axes and guns, but with no money at all. The pioneers were thrifty or they would have perished: they had to store away food for the winter. or goods, to trade for food, and they often feared they had not stored enough-they left traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion: to save, even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline. No matter how prosperous they were they could not spend money either upon ''art," or upon mere luxury and enter tafnment, without a sense of sin.
 Against so homespun a background the magnif1cence of the Ambersons was 0c funeral. Major Anderson bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National avenue; and through this tract he built broad. streets and cross streets; paved them with cedar block, and curbed them with stone. He set up fountains, here and there, where the streets intersected, and at symmetri- gal intervals placed cast-iron statues, painted white, with their titles clear upon the pedestals; Minerva, Mer- cury, Hercules, Venus,g Gladiator, Elm peror Augustus, Fisher Boy, Stag hound, Mastiff, Greyhound. Pawn, Antelope, Wounded Doe and Wounded Lion. Most of the forest trees had been left to flourish still, and. at some distance, or by moonlight, the place
 
 citizen, loving to see his city grow, wanted neither distance nor moon light. He had not seen Versailles, but, standing before the fountain of Neptune in Anderson addition, at bright noon, and quoting the favOrite comparison of the local newspapers he declared Versailles eutdone. All this Art showed a profit from the start, for the lots sold well and there was something like a rush to build in the new Addition. Its main thor oughfare, an oblique continuation of National avenue, was called Amber son boulevard, and here, at the june ture of the new boulevard and the avenue, Major Anderson reserved four acres for himself and built his new flouse-the Anderson mansion, of course.
 This house was the pride of the town. Faced with stone as far back as the dining-room windows, 1t was a house of arches and turrets and gir- ding stone porches: 1t had the first porte cochere seen in that town. There was a central front hall' with q great black-walnut stairway, and open to a green glass skylight called the dome" three stories above the ground floor. A ballroom occupied most of the third story, and at one end of 1t was carved a walnut gallery for the musicians. Citizens told stran- gers that the cost of all this black walnut and wood carving was sixty thousand dollars. Sixty thousand dollars for the woodwork alone! Yes, sir, and hardwood floors all over the house! Turkish rugs and no carpets at all, except Brussels carpet in the front par1or-I hear they call 1t the reception room Hot and cold water upstairs and down, and stationary