Some time before, the Old Spirit of Bingville had received notice that its services would no longer be required. It had been an industrious and faithful Old Spirit. The new generation did not intend to be hard on it. They were willing to give it a comfortable home as long as it lived. Its home was to be a beautiful and venerable asylum called The Past. There it was to have nothing to do but to sit around and weep and talk of bygone days. The Old Spirit rebelled. It refused to abandon its appointed tasks. The notice had been given soon after the new theater was opened in the Sneed Block, and the endless flood of moving lights and shadows began to fall on its screen. The low-born, purblind intellects of Bohemian New York began to pour their lewd fancies into this great stream that flowed through every city, town and village in the land. They had no more compunction in the matter than a rattlesnake when it swallows a rabbit. To them, there were only two great, bare facts in life--male and female. The males, in their vulgar parlance, were either "wise guys" or "suckers"! The females were all "my dears." Much of this mental sewage smelled to heaven. But it paid. It was cheap and entertaining. It relieved the tedium of small-town life. Judge Crooker was in the little theater the evening that the Old Spirit of Bingville received notice to quit. The sons and daughters and even the young children of the best families in the village were there. Scenes from the shady side of the great cities, bar-room adventures with pugilists and porcelain-faced women, the thin-ice skating of illicit love succeeded one another on the screen. The tender souls of the young received the impression that life in the great world was mostly drunkenness, violence, lust, and Great White Waywardness of one kind or another. Judge Crooker shook his head and his fist as he went out and expressed his view to Phyllis and her mother in the lobby. Going home, they called him an old prude. The knowledge that every night this false instruction was going on in the Sneed Block filled the good man with sorrow and apprehension. He complained to Mr. Leak, the manager, who said that he would like to give clean shows, but that he had to take what was sent him.