There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian

Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their

eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a

Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level:

bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in

summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill

slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man

in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at

intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious,

patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited

flies by. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway

stations--sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that

somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are

grouped about a couple of brick stores.

On the station platforms there are always two or three wooden packing-

boxes, apparently marked for travel, but they are sacred from disturbance

and remain on the platform forever; possibly the right train never comes

along. They serve to enthrone a few station loafers, who look out from

under their hat-brims at the faces in the car-windows with the languid

scorn a permanent fixture always has for a transient, and the pity an

American feels for a fellow-being who does not live in his town. Now and

then the train passes a town built scatteringly about a court-house, with

a mill or two humming near the tracks. This is a county-seat, and the

inhabitants and the local papers refer to it confidently as "our city."

The heart of the flat lands is a central area called Carlow County, and

the county-seat of Carlow is a town unhappily named in honor of its first

settler, William Platt, who christened it with his blood. Natives of this

place have sometimes remarked, easily, that their city had a population of

from five to six thousand souls. It is easy to forgive them for such

statements; civic pride is a virtue.

The social and business energy of Plattville concentrates on the Square.

Here, in summer-time, the gentlemen are wont to lounge from store to store

in their shirt sleeves; and here stood the old, red-brick court-house,

loosely fenced in a shady grove of maple and elm--"slipp'ry ellum"--called

the "Court-House Yard." When the sun grew too hot for the dry-goods box

whittlers in front of the stores around the Square and the occupants of

the chairs in front of the Palace Hotel on the corner, they would go

across and drape themselves over the court-house fence, under the trees,

and leisurely carve there initials on the top board. The farmers hitched

their teams to the fence, for there were usually loafers energetic enough

to shout "Whoa!" if the flies worried the horses beyond patience. In the

yard, amongst the weeds and tall, unkept grass, chickens foraged all day

long; the fence was so low that the most matronly hen flew over with

propriety; and there were gaps that accommodated the passage of itinerant

pigs. Most of the latter, however, preferred the cool wallows of the less

important street corners. Here and there a big dog lay asleep in the

middle of the road, knowing well that the easy-going Samaritan, in his

case, would pass by on the other side.




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