And by that time most of their old neighbors and
fellow church-members had gone too--some southward, some northward, some
heavenward. Then business, in the guise of big hotels, began marching
down the street upon them, and business in all manner of guise ran up
towering walls behind them that shut off the summer sun hours before it
was due to sink; and traffic rang incessant gongs at their back door, and
drew lengthening lines of freight-cars across the lake view from their
front one; and Sunday crowds strolled and sprawled over the wide green
between the roadway and the waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers
advanced daily in a steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars
and chains and gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep
mine from becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls
had almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state
of siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat;
they were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die
either.
As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the
most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the
half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit
and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in
upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade;
he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon
his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black
plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon
municipal rights.
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