Wooden buildings, stores,
elevators, blacksmith, harness, and shoemaker shops, and the dwellings of
those who did the work of the little town, gathered about; in time some of
the pioneer settlers leaving their farms to the care of children or
tenants moved into the town; the primitive stores were rebuilt in brick;
houses of pretentious architecture crowded out of the best sites the first
dwellings; and in twenty or thirty years it had become a village of
several hundred people: retired farmers or their widows, men of the
younger generation living on the income of their farms without more than
nominal occupation, and those who buy the produce and minister to the
wants of this little community. Most of the villagers and most of the
farmers in all the country about have the telephone in their houses and
can talk as much as they please with their neighbors at a very small
yearly charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock markets by
telephone, have their daily metropolitan paper, a county paper, monthly
magazines (of which they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an
organ, more likely, now, a phonograph, which reproduces, if they choose,
what is heard in Paris or in concerts or the grand opera; reproductions of
pieces of statuary or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving
horse or an automobile.
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