The voice of the magistrate
rose like a bird in slow flight, then settled to a brief drone.
* * * * *
East is East and West is West, and St. Louis is neither. It lies like a
mediator, the westerly hand of the east end of the country stretching
across the sullenest part of the Mississippi to clasp the easterly hand
of the west end of the country.
Indians have at one time or another left their chirography upon the face
of St. Louis. But all that is effaced now under the hot lava of
Americanism that is covering the major cities in more or less even
layers. Now it stands atop its Indian mounds, a metropolis of almost a
million souls, a twenty-story office-building upon the site of an old
trading-post, and a subway threatening the city's inners. There is a
highly restricted residence district given over to homes of the most
stucco period of the Italian Renaissance, and an art-museum, as high on
the brow of a hill as the Athenians loved to build. St. Louis has not
yet a Champs-Elysees or a Fifth Avenue. And of warm evenings it takes
its walks without hats. Neither is the cafe or the cabaret its
evening solace.
It dines, even in its renaissance section, placidly _chez soi;_ the
family activities of the day here thrown into a common pool of
discussion.
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