it too well. Across the face of one of the buildings there was an
enormous sign: "Sheridan Automatic Pump Co., Inc."

Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and
adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden
houses of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on
narrow lots and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy
sunlight from one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another
root and branch some night when the right wind blew. They were only
waiting for that wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone
together--a pinch of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.

Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there
a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some
people said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some
were sure that asphalt and "improving" the streets did it; but Bigness
was in too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-
poles and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles
by the thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and
put up his poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and
sometimes the wires fell and killed people--but not often enough to
matter at all.

Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the
town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in
transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into
segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into
trade, brazenly putting forth "show-windows" on their first floors,
seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades
peeped humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one