these things so that you'll see why I am so
warped and foolish regarding Williston; it's just my small town
ignorance--My, I wish that chap would get a job!

VI

HOMEBURG'S WORST ENEMY

_How Old Man Opportunity Stands Outside the Town and Beckons to her
Greatest Men_

You don't say, Jim! Gosh, let me look! Where? Behind the big fellow in
the two-gallon plug hat? There--I see him! Yes, sir! It's he! I could
tell him anywhere. Do you suppose we could get up nearer? What, go up in
the elevator with him? Say, I haven't the nerve. No, I don't want--This
is close enough--Why, there isn't even a crowd! You mean to say he comes
down here just like this right along? Do you see him often?

Why, when I go home and tell the boys I watched Teddy Roosevelt go down
the street common as dirt and could have gone up in the same elevator
with him, they'll want me to give a lecture in the Woodmen Hall. It
certainly beats all what you can see in New York for nothing.

That's where you have all the luck, Jim--you big city folks. You keep
your interesting people at home; there's nowhere bigger for them to go.
No matter how famous or successful they are, they have to stick around
and mingle unless they get Europitis of the intellect. When you grow up
with a chum in New York and he discovers a talent that has been kicking
around in his garret ever since he was born, you don't lose him. He just
stays at home and grows up to fit the town. But when I want to see my
old Homeburg playmates who have succeeded, I have to go to New York or
Chicago or San Francisco, or some other big place where old Opportunity
keeps a wrecking crew busy all the time beating in doors. Opportunity
doesn't come into a small town and knock. He stands outside and beckons.

Life in Homeburg is one long bereavement because of this fact. Seems as
if the world was always looking Homeburg men over, the way a housewife
looks over an asparagus patch, and yanking out the ones who stick up a
little higher than the rest. We don't worry about the good who die young
in Homeburg; but the interesting who go early and forget to come back
make us sad and sore. No sooner does a Homeburg man begin to broaden out
and get successful and to hoist the town upward as he climbs himself,
than we begin to grieve. We know what is coming. Presently he will go
down to the _Democrat_ office and insert a notice, advertising for sale
a seven-room house with gas and water, good cistern, orc