with their perky
little towers and aesthetic diamond-paned windows, multiplied.

Fairbridge was in reality very artistically planned as to the sites
of its houses. Instead of the regulation Main Street of the country
village, with its centre given up to shops and post-office, side
streets wound here and there, and houses were placed with a view to
effect.

The Main Street of Fairbridge was as naught from a social point of
view. Nobody of any social importance lived there. Even the
physicians had their residences and offices in a more aristocratic
locality. Upon the Main Street proper, that which formed the centre
of the village, there were only shops and a schoolhouse and one or
two mean public buildings. For a village of the self-importance of
Fairbridge, the public buildings were very few and very mean. There
was no city hall worthy of the name of this little city which held
its head so high. The City Hall, so designated by ornate gilt letters
upon the glass panel of a very small door, occupied part of the
building in which was the post-office. It was a tiny building, two
stories high. On the second floor was the millinery shop of Mrs.
Creevy, and behind it the two rooms in which she kept house with her
daughter Jessy.

On the lower floor was the post-office on the right, filthy with the
foot tracks of the Fairbridge children who crowded it in a noisy
rabble twice a day, and perpetually red-stained with the shale of New
Jersey, brought in upon the boots of New Jersey farmers, who always
bore about with them a goodly portion of their native soil. On the
left, was the City Hall. This was vacant except upon the first Monday
of every month, when the janitor of the Dutch Reformed Church, who
eked out a scanty salary with divers other tasks, got himself to
work, and slopped pails of water over the floor, then swept, and
built a fire, if in winter.

Upon the evenings of these first Mondays the Mayor and city officials
met and made great talk over small matters, and with the labouring of
a mountain, brought forth mice. The City Hall was closed upon other
occasions, unless the village talent gave a play for some local
benefit. Fairbridge was intensely dramatic, and it was popularly
considered that great, natural, histrionic gifts were squandered upon
the Fairbridge audiences, appreciative though they were. Outside
talent was never in evidence in Fairbridge. No theatrical company had
ever essayed to rent that City Hall. P