 | The mystery of Metropolisville |  |
WORDS BEFOREHAND.
METROPOLISVILLE is nothing but a memory
now. If Jonah's gourd had not been a
little too much used already, it would serve an
excellent turn just here in the way of an apt
figure of speech illustrating the growth, the
wilting, and the withering of Metropolisville. The last
time I saw the place the grass grew green where once stood
the City Hall, the corn-stalks waved their banners on the very
site of the old store—I ask pardon, the “Emporium”—of
Jackson, Jones & Co., and what had been the square, staring
white court-house—not a Temple but a Barn of Justice—had
long since fallen to base uses. The walls which had echoed
with forensic grandiloquence were now forced to hear only
the bleating of silly sheep. The church, the school-house, and
the City Hotel had been moved away bodily. The village
grew, as hundreds of other frontier villages had grown, in the
flush times; it died, as so many others died, of the financial
madness. Its history resembles the history of other
Western towns of the sort so strongly, that I should not take
the trouble to write about it, nor ask you to take the trouble
to read about it, if the history of the town did not involve
also the history of certain human lives—of a tragedy that
touched deeply more than one soul. And what is history
worth but for its human interest? The history of Athens is
not of value on account of its temples and statues, but on account
of its men and women. And though the “Main street”
of Metropolisville is now a country road where the dog-fennel
blooms almost undisturbed by comers and goers, though
the plowshare remorselessly turns over the earth in places
where corner lots were once sold for a hundred dollars the
front foot, and though the lot once sacredly set apart (on the
map) as “Depot Ground” is now nothing but a potato-patch,
yet there are hearts on which the brief history of Metropolisville
has left traces ineffaceable by sunshine or storm, in
time or eternity.
| The mystery of Metropolisville | |