In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid mud. They led to the houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the shoulder. “Jim,” he said, “I am good friends with you and I always like to see you. But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has always treated me fine, and I don’t like to have you come into my place, because I know he don’t like it, and it puts me in bad with him.” So I was shut out of that. Black Hawk is about as dead as Gopher Prairie or Winesburg, Ohio. Poor Jim! There are very few distractions in this far Western village. There is the druggist across his ice-cream and soda counter, the tobacconist and the old German who stuffs birds, both of them great gossips. The great thrill is going to see the night train fly by at the depot. At the telegraph office, the idle clerk comforts himself in pinning on the wall portraits of actors and actresses which he procured with cigarette premiums. Then there is the station master who tries to forget the death of his twins by fishing and writing letters to obtain a change of residence: “These,” says Jim, “were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o’clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.