The country round about has grown
rich and prosperous. Each year more and heavier trains thunder past on
their way to and from the great city by the distant river, stopping only
to take water. But in this swiftly moving stream of life Corinth is
caught in an eddy. Her small world has come to swing in a very small
circle--it can scarcely be said to swing at all. The very children stop
growing when they become men and women, and are content to dream the
dreams their fathers' fathers dreamed, even as they live in the houses
the fathers of their fathers built. Only the trees that line the unpaved
streets have grown--grown and grown until overhead their great tops touch
to shut out the sky with an arch of green, and their mighty trunks crowd
contemptuously aside the old sidewalks, with their decayed and broken
boards.
Old Town, a mile away, is given over to the negroes. The few buildings
that remain are fallen into ruin, save as they are patched up by their
dusky tenants. And on the hill, the old Academy with its broken windows,
crumbling walls, and fallen chimneys, stands a pitiful witness of an
honor and dignity that is gone.
Poor Corinth! So are gone the days of her true glory--the glory of her
usefulness, while the days of her promised honor and power are not yet
fulfilled.
And because the town of this story is what it is, there came to dwell in
it a Spirit--a strange, mysterious power--playful, vicious, deadly; a
Something to be at once feared and courted; to be denied--yet confessed
in the denial; a dreaded enemy, a welcome friend, an all-powerful Ally.
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