inese umbrellas of paper to
the chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They "studied"
painting on china, these girls; they sang Tosti's new songs; they
sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and
were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a
basket phaeton, on a spring morning.

Croquet and the mildest archery ever known were the sports of people
still young and active enough for so much exertion; middle-age played
euchre. There was a theatre, next door to the Amberson Hotel, and when
Edwin Booth came for a night, everybody who could afford to buy a ticket
was there, and all the "hacks" in town were hired. "The Black Crook"
also filled the theatre, 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 theatre did not
often do so well; 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 wilderness and had reached it 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 entertainment, without a sense of sin.

Against so homespun a background the magnificence of the Ambersons was
as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. Major Amberson 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 symmetrical intervals placed
cast-iron statues, painted white, with their titles clear upon the
pedestals: Minerva, Mercury, Hercules, Venus, Gladiator, Emperor
Augustus, Fisher Boy, Stag-hound, Mastiff, Greyhound, Fawn, Antelope,
Wounded Doe, and Wounded Lion. Most of the forest trees had been left to
flourish still, and, at some distance,