ith her.

New faces appeared at the dances of the winter; new faces had
been appearing everywhere, for that matter, and familiar ones were
disappearing, merged in the increasing crowd, or gone forever and missed
a little and not long; for the town was growing and changing as it never
had grown and changed before.

It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly;
and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky.
Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run; a raw, new house would
appear on a country road; four or five others would presently be built
at intervals between it and the outskirts of the town; the country road
would turn into an asphalt street with a brick-faced drugstore and a
frame grocery at a corner; then bungalows and six-room cottages would
swiftly speckle the open green spaces--and a farm had become a suburb
which would immediately shoot out other suburbs into the country, on
one side, and, on the other, join itself solidly to the city. You drove
between pleasant fields and woodland groves one spring day; and in the
autumn, passing over the same ground, you were warned off the tracks by
an interurban trolley-car's gonging, and beheld, beyond cement sidewalks
just dry, new house-owners busy "moving in." Gasoline and electricity
were performing the miracles Eugene had predicted.

But the great change was in the citizenry itself. What was left of
the patriotic old-stock generation that had fought the Civil War, and
subsequently controlled politics, had become venerable and was little
heeded. The descendants of the pioneers and early settlers were merging
into the new crowd, becoming part of it, little to be distinguished from
it. What happened to Boston and to Broadway happened in degree to the
Midland city; the old stock became less and less typical, and of the
grown people who called the place home, less than a third had been born
in it. There was a German quarter; there was a Jewish quarter; there was
a negro quarter--square miles of it--called "Bucktown"; there were many
Irish neighbourhoods; and there were large settlements of Italians,
and of Hungarians, and of Rumanians, and of Serbians and other Balkan
peoples. But not the emigrants, themselves, were the almost dominant
type on the streets downtown. That type was the emigrant's prosperous
offspring: descendant of the emigrations of the Seventies and Eighties
and Nineties, those great folk-journeyings i