All the same, Herculaneum was a beautiful city in parts.  Great leafy maples and elms arched the streets in the residential quarters, and the streets themselves were broad and straight.  There were several dignified buildings of ten and twelve stories, many handsome banks, several clubs, and two or three passable monuments.  There were at that time five enterprising newspapers, four frankly partizan and one independent.  Personalities entered freely into the editorials, which often abounded in wit and scholarship.  There were three theaters, and many churches of many denominations; religion and amusement, to thrive, must have variety.  There were great steel shops, machine-shops, factories and breweries.  And there were a few people who got in touch with one another, and invented society.

Herculaneum has its counterpart in every state; each city is a composite of all the others.  A fashion in New York is immediately reproduced in every other city on the continent.  Conservatism, day by day, becomes more and more retiring; presently it will exist only in Webster, side by side with the word prehistoric.

It was Sunday in Herculaneum, a June Sunday, radiant with sunshine.  The broad green leaves of the maples shivered, lacing the streets with amber and jade, and from a thousand emerald gardens rose the subtle, fragrant incense of flowers.  How still and beautiful this day seems to us who have hurried hither and thither for six long days, sometimes in anger, sometimes in exultation, failure or success!  It breathes a peace and quiet that is tonic.  Upon this day there is truce between us and the enemy.

In Herculaneum they still went to church on a Sunday morning.  Perhaps it was merely habit, perhaps it was simply formality, perhaps it was only to parade new clothes; anyhow, they went to church.  At ten-thirty the procession started; gentlemen in their tiles, ladies in their furbelows, children stiffly starched.  Some rode to church, but the majority walked.  There were many store-windows to preen before, as in a mirror.  Vanity has something to her credit, after all; it is due to her that most of us make an effort to keep spruce and clean.

Comment passed like the fall of dominoes.  Some woman, ultra-fashionable, would start the chatter.  She never saw anything like the gowns Mrs. Jones wore; Mrs. Jones touched upon the impossible feathers of Mrs. Smith’s hat, and Mrs. Smith in turn questioned the exquisite complexion of Mrs. Green, who thought Mrs. White’s children the homeliest in the city. (Can’t you hear the dominoes going down?)

The men nodded here and there, briefly.  Saturday night in a provincial town holds many recollections.