remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty
dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the
freshness of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful
gladness in his heart.

But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a
dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced,
blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he
should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius
of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of
delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of
the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap,
with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men
spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the
spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the
field, and made haste to occupy it.

So in South Tredegar, besprent now before the wondering eyes of a Thomas
Jefferson. The muddy street had vanished to give place to a smooth black
roadway, as springy under foot as a forest path, and as clean as the
pike after a sweeping summer storm. The shops, with their false fronts
and shabby lean-to awnings, were gone, or going, and in their room
majestic vastnesses in brick and cut stone were rising, by their own
might, as it would seem, out of disorderly mountains of building
material.

Street-cars, propelled as yet by the patient mule, tinkled their bells
incessantly. Smart vehicles of many kinds strange to Paradise eyes
rattled recklessly in and out among the street obstructions. Bustling
throngs were in possession of the sidewalks; of the awe-inspiring