cific--Prosperity. Before
its advent, the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings, the Prestons and the
Atterburys lived leisurely lives in a sleepy quarter of shade trees
and spacious yards and muddy macadam streets, now passed away forever.
Existence was decorous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives,
and the Authorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So
Dr. Gilman preached, and so they believed.

Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days--you could
tell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changed
the quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses,
knew it: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.
Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their minds
with ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church
bells. You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city
suddenly became full of churches, as though they had magically been let
down from heaven during Saturday night. They must have been there on
week days, but few persons ever thought of them.

Among the many church bells that rang on those bygone Sundays was that
of St. John's, of which Dr. Gilman, of beloved memory, was rector. Dr.
Gilman was a saint, and if you had had the good luck to be baptized or
married or buried by him, you were probably fortunate in an earthly as
well as heavenly sense. One has to be careful not to deal exclusively in
superlatives, and yet it is not an exaggeration to say that St. John's
was the most beautiful and churchly edifice in the city, thanks
chiefly to several gentlemen of sense, and one gentleman, at least, of
taste--Mr. Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its
building; but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoiled as
yet by factory smoke, its spire delicately pointing to untainted skies,
its rose window glowing above the porch, citizens on Tower Street often
stopped to gaze at it diagonally across the vacant lot set in order by
Mr. Thurston Gore, with the intent that the view might be unobstructed.

Little did the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings and Prestons and
Atterburys and other prominent people foresee the havoc that prosperity
and smoke were to play with their residential plans! One by one, sooty
commerce drove them out, westward, conservative though they were, from
the paradise they had created; blacker and blacker grew the gothic
facade of St. J