The boys, hearing this question, break into a roar of laughter, the women titter behind their paper napkins, and even from Tillie there is a little shriek of appreciation. "Mamma," one of the twins comes out in a shrill treble, "why is Tillie Kronborg always talking about a thousand dollars?" She is surrounded by a crowd of boys,-loose and lanky, short and thick,-who are joking with her roughly, but not unkindly. She has a long chin, a long nose, and she is dressed like a young girl, with a pink sash and a lace garden hat with pink rosebuds. There sits a spry little old spinster whom they know well. While they are eating their ice-cream and trying not to twist the spoon in their mouths, a little shriek of laughter breaks from an adjacent table. The twins are well-behaved children, biddable, meek, neat about their clothes, and always mindful of the proprieties they have learned at summer hotels. Her husband is president of the new bank, and she "goes East for her summers," a practice which causes envy and discontent among her neighbors. The country child, in made-overs and cut-downs, seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.Īt one of the tables, with her Dutch-cut twin boys, sits a fair-haired, dimpled matron who was once Lily Fisher. The little boys wear "Buster Browns" and the little girls Russian blouses. Kronborg's time, and the children all look like city children. The interior of the new Methodist Church looks like a theater, with a sloping floor, and as the congregation proudly say, "opera chairs." The matrons who attend to serving the refreshments to-night look younger for their years than did the women of Mrs. The people seated about under the cottonwoods are much smarter than the Methodists we used to know. Cultivation has modified the soil and the climate, as it modifies human life. The old inhabitants will tell you that sandstorms are infrequent now, that the wind blows less persistently in the spring and plays a milder tune. The grass grows thicker over the dunes than it used to, and the streets of the town are harder and firmer than they were twenty-five years ago. To the east the sand hills shine white as of old, but the empire of the sand is gradually diminishing. The paper lanterns which hang among the trees are foolish toys, only dimming, in little lurid circles, the great softness of the lunar light that floods the blue heavens and the high plateau. The Methodists are giving an ice-cream sociable in the grove about the new court-house.
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