As they stepped out upon the street a station wagon driven by an old
negro appeared promptly at the curb.

"Mawnin', Cap'n; mawnin'! Yo' just on time. Mis' Sally tole me to kerry
you all right up to the haouse. Yes, seh."

Sylvia did not know, what later historians may be interested to learn
from these pages, that the station wagon, drawn by a single horse, was
for years the commonest vehicle known to the people of the Hoosier
capital. The panic of 1873 had hit the town so hard, the community's
punishment for its sins of inflation had been so drastic, that it had
accepted meekly the rebuke implied in its designation as a one-horse
town. In 1884 came another shock to confidence, and in 1893, still
another earthquake, as though the knees of the proud must at intervals
be humbled. The one-horse station wagon continued to symbolize the
quiet domesticity of the citizens of the Hoosier capital: women of
unimpeachable social standing carried their own baskets through the
aisles of the city market or drove home with onion tops waving
triumphantly on the seat beside them. We had not yet hitched our wagon
to a gasoline tank, but traffic regulations were enforced by cruel
policemen, to the terror of women long given to leisurely manoeuvres on
the wrong side of our busiest thoroughfares. The driving of cattle
through Washington Street did not cease until 1888, when cobbles yielded
to asphalt. It was in that same year that Benjamin Harrison was chosen
to the seat of the Presidents. What hallowed niches now enshrine the
General's fence, utterly disintegrated and appropriated, during that
bannered and vociferous summer, by pious pilgrims!

Down the busy meridional avenue that opened before Sylvia as they drove