Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/344

 result than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little "parlor," where the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man, and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that forbidding spot.

All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town, belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and responsibilities.