Page:The Magnificent Ambersons (Illustrated by Arthur William Brown).djvu/18

10 men of the Midland town; and the introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably cursed those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more. For all their seeming permanence they might as well have been buffaloes or the buffalo laprobes that grew bald in patches and used to slide from the careless drivers' knees and hang unconcerned, half way to the ground. The stables have been transformed into other likenesses, or swept away, like the woodsheds where were kept the stove-wood and kindling that the "girl" and the "hired-man" always quarrelled over: who should fetch it. Horse and stable and woodshed, and the whole tribe of the "hired-man," all are gone. They went quickly, yet so silently that we whom they served have not yet really noticed that they are vanished.

So with other vanishings. There were the little bunty street-cars on the long, single track that went its troubled way among the cobblestones. At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but a step where passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad and the car crowded. The patrons if not too absent-minded put their fares into a slot; and no conductor paced the heaving floor, but the driver would rap remindingly with his elbow