Newton walked over to a table
and wrote a note, and then slipped out of the club; and when next day
I inquired after him of the boy at the door, he said he had left word
to tell anyone who asked for him, that he would not be back
till after Christmas; that he had gone home to Virginia.
Several of the other fellows went off home too, myself among them,
and I was glad I did, for I heard one of the men say he never knew the club
so deserted as it was that Christmas-day.
Little Darby
I
The County had been settled as a "frontier" in early colonial days,
and when it ceased to be frontier, settlement had taken a jump beyond it,
and in a certain sense over it, to the richer lands of the Piedmont. When,
later on, steam came, the railway simply cut across it at its narrowest part,
and then skirted along just inside its border on the bank of the little river
which bounded it on the north, as if it intentionally left it to one side.
Thus, modern progress had not greatly interfered with it
either for good or bad, and its development was entirely natural.
It was divided into "neighborhoods", a name in itself implying something
both of its age and origin; for the population was old,
and the customs of life and speech were old likewise.
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