Produced by David Widger
By Winston Churchill
With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place inone of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of thatportion called the Middle West,—a city once conservative and provincial,and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them, and linked bylightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the modern world: acity overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has swept ourcountry from the Atlantic to the Pacific—Prosperity. Before its advent,the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings, the Prestons and the Atterburyslived leisurely lives in a sleepy quarter of shade trees and spaciousyards and muddy macadam streets, now passed away forever. Existence wasdecorous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives, and theAuthorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So Dr.Gilman preached, and so they believed.
Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days—you couldtell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changedthe quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses, knewit: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their mindswith ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church bells.You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city suddenlybecame full of churches, as though they had magically been let down fromheaven during Saturday night. They must have been there on week days,but few persons ever thought of them.
Among the many church bells that rang on those bygone Sundays wasthat of St. John's, of which Dr. Gilman, of beloved memory, was rector.Dr. Gilman was a saint, and if you had had the good luck to be baptizedor married or buried by him, you were probably fortunate in an earthly aswell as heavenly sense. One has to be careful not to deal exclusively insuperlatives, and yet it is not an exaggeration to say that St. John'swas the most beautiful and churchly edifice in the city, thanks chieflyto several gentlemen of sense, and one gentleman, at least, of taste—Mr.Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its building;but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoile