tten, or to be remembered only as a
dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced,
blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he
should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius
of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of
delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of
the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap,
with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men
spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the
spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the
field, and made haste to occupy it.

So in South Tredegar, besprent now before the wondering eyes of a Thomas
Jefferson. The muddy street had vanished to give place to a smooth black
roadway, as springy under foot as a forest path, and as clean as the
pike after a sweeping summer storm. The shops, with their false fronts
and shabby lean-to awnings, were gone, or going, and in their room
majestic vastnesses in brick and cut stone were rising, by their own
might, as it would seem, out of disorderly mountains of building
material.

Street-cars, propelled as yet by the patient mule, tinkled their bells
incessantly. Smart vehicles of many kinds strange to Paradise eyes
rattled recklessly in and out among the street obstructions. Bustling
throngs were in possession of the sidewalks; of the awe-inspiring
restaurant, where they gave you lemonade in a glass bowl and some people
washed their fingers in it; of the rotunda of the Marlboro, the mammoth
hotel which had grown up on the site of the old Calhoun
House,--distressing crowds and multitudes of people everywhere.

Thomas Jefferson, awe-struck and gaping, found himself foot-loose for a
time in the Marlboro rotunda while his father talked with a man who
wanted to bargain for the entire output of the Paradise furnace by the
year. The commercial transaction touched him lightly; but the moving
groups, the imported bell-boys, the tesselated floors, frescoed ceiling
and plush-covered furniture--these bit deeply. Could this be South
Tredegar, the place that had hitherto figured chiefly to him as
"court-day" town and the residence of his preacher uncle? It seemed
hugely incredible.

After the conference with the iron buyer they crossed the street to the
railway station; and again Thomas Jefferson was foot-loose while his
father w