an hour, and in cold or rainy
weather, of which there is a good deal in Alton, seemed truly
interminable. From the "Square," which no longer had the noble amplitude
of my memory, the direct way to Fuller Place lay up the South Road,--a
broad thoroughfare, through the center of which there used to trickle
occasionally a tiny horse-drawn vehicle to and from the great city of
B----. South Road, I found, had changed its name to the more pompous
designation of State Avenue, and it was noisy and busy enough to accord
with my childish imagination of it, but none too large for the mammoth
moving-vans in which the electric railroad now transported the
inhabitants. These shot by me in bewildering numbers. I had chosen to
make the rest of my journey on foot, trying leisurely to revive old
memories and sensations. For a few blocks I succeeded in picking out
here and there a familiar object, but by the time I reached the
cross-street where we used to descend from the street-cars and penetrate
the lane that led to Fuller Place I was completely at sea. The ample
wooden houses fronting the South Road, each surrounded by its green lawn
with appropriate shrubbery, had all given way before the march of brick
business blocks. Even the "Reformed Methodist" church on the corner of
Lamb Street had been replaced by a stone structure that discreetly
concealed its denominational quality from the passer-by. Beyond the
church there had been a half-mile of unoccupied land fronting on the
Road, but now the line of "permanent improvements" ran unbroken as far
as the eye could see. Into this maze of unfamiliar buildings I plunged
and wandered at random for half an hour through blocks of brick stores,
office buildings, factories, tenements,--chiefly tenements it seemed to
me. Off in one corner of the district instead of high tenement buildings
there was something almost worse, rows of mean, little two-story brick
cottages that ranged upwards along a gentle slope that I tried to fancy
was Swan's Hill,--a dangerous descent where my older brothers and I were
once allowed to coast on our "double-runner." I will not weary the
reader with further details of my wandering with its disappointment and
shattered illusions, which can in no way be of interest to any but the
one in search of his past, and of purely sentimental importance to him.
It is, of course, a common form of egotism to chronicle such small-beer
of one's origin, but it happens to have nothing to