Back of my generation the batting average was just about as good. It seemed to have been the fashion of Homeburg boys of thirty years ago to go out and run Nebraska politically. Two governors and a representative have come from our town. If we had them here now, we wouldn't have to fight so desperately to get a county surveyor or coroner on the ticket every four years. Samuel P. Wiggins, who now lives in a stone hut covering an acre in Chicago and owns a flock of flour mills, was once Sam Wiggins, who bought grain in our town and married the daughter of one of our most reliable washerwomen. She comes back occasionally now, and we can't see but that she's as nice as she used to be when she hauled our family wash home in a little wagon every Saturday night. Being rich hasn't hurt her at all, though it has spoiled her figure beyond the utmost and most heartrending efforts of her clothes to conceal. Then there's Mrs. Maysworth. When she comes down from Chicago for a visit, the old town fairly hums for a month. We pick up our interest in art and woman's suffrage and cheap trips to Europe and Dante's _Inferno_; the Shakespeare Club is revived, the bookstore sells its copy of Browning, and the tone of the afternoon teas goes up about two hundred per cent. Mrs. Maysworth was the ruling spirit of a little bunch of prosperous Homeburg people who lived at the end of Milk Street--we used to call it the cream end of Milk Street. When they were with us, Homeburg was called the Athens of the Steenth Congressional District. We heard singers and lecturers, who jumped towns of fifty thousand on either side of us. We had state presidents of Women's Federations and Church Societies. We had a free library before Mr. Carnegie had a bank account. North Milk Street established it, and every Saturday afternoon the muddy feet of the tough south side kids scuffled over Mrs. Maysworth's hardwood floors, the first west of Chicago, while their owners drew out books, the said library being located in an extinct conservatory, which protruded from the house like a large wart. Homeburg was a Mecca of learning and refinement in those days; and then six of these families pulled out in the same year and moved to Chicago, where they could soak up a little more culture instead of giving away all they had. They left a chasm in our midst as big as the Grand Canyon. It never has been filled--for me at least. I feel, when I wander up that fine old shady street, past those houses filled with people who are only as wise as I am, as if I were wandering through the deserted haunts of an ancient and irreplaceable civilization.