The streets of Mome were the streets of Anneville, running right and left, in and out, as she knew and saw, but over these—Hill Street, Main Street, Jackson Street, Simon Street, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane—lay the great city of Mome, reaching out for miles and adding other streets and avenues, Chester, Dover, Cowslip, Bangor, Elm, Pine, Walnut, Vine, and many more, running out among fair parks and lovely gardens. Instead of the low shops on Main Street there arose great office buildings and spires and towers where people fluttered by, quick in their steps, beautiful, alert. On Jackson Street in Anneville grew great poplar trees under which men sat all day telling slow stories they had told over and over before, old men grown epic with age and fatalism. Their refrains recurring were, “Ain’t that always the way!... No sooner you get ... but along comes a place to spend it.... Looks like as soon as a man gets on his feet.... Always the way....” They spoke without malice, interspersing their wisdom with long slow happenings. “Did ever you know hit to fail?... Would a man ever strike hit on his corn and his wheat in one and the same year?... But of course it had to happen that way.... About the time Luke got outen that-there fix here a note he owed at the bank fell due, but it so happened that corn turned out right good that year and he tided over....” These were the leisured and the old setting a summary on the town. In the square the prisoners from the jail worked on the rock pile and thus gave a meager drama to the slow scene. But over this lay Jackson Street in Mome, as one might read in a book, tall offices and great palaces where courts were held, where the great went about the great business of the world, the great business of men. Over the cobbler’s shop stood a palace where some unguessed thing transpired. Coincident with Rusty Fuller’s harness shop, having its same contours enhanced and made splendid in size, stood a white tower with a top that shone high in the sunlight and here some important deed not yet realized or named had befallen and would continue to befall. Beyond stood the library, pillars of marble and cupola of gold, and inside one could have all the books of the world for the asking. Great tiers of books, bound in brown or gold or blue, stood on shelves, the wonders of all ages and the knowledge of all time, future and past. One had only to go inside the wide marble doors and nothing would be denied, the reason for this or that and the time of all things being there set down in books and explained, and there were all beautiful stories and songs.