The Dim Lantern

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Dim Lantern, by Temple Bailey, Illustrated by Coles Phillips
IN HER ORANGE CLOAK SHE SHONE THROUGH THE VEIL OF MIST, LUMINOUS
BY TEMPLE BAILEY Author of “The Gay Cockade,” “The Trumpeter Swan,” “The Tin Soldier,” etc.
Illustrated by COLES PHILLIPS
THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA 1923
COPYRIGHT 1922 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
The Dim Lantern Made in the U. S. A.


The Dim Lantern
Sherwood Park is twelve miles from Washington. Starting as a somewhat pretentious suburb on the main line of a railroad, it was blessed with easy accessibility until encroaching trolleys swept the tide of settlement away from it, and left it high and dry—its train service, unable to compete with modern motor vehicles, increasingly inefficient.
Property values, inevitably, decreased. The little suburb degenerated, grew less fashionable. People who might have added social luster to its gatherings moved away. The frame houses, which at first had made such a brave showing, became a bit down at the heel. Most of them, built before the revival of good taste in architecture, seemed top-heavy and dull with their imitation towers, their fretted balconies, their gray and brown coloring, their bands of contrasting shingles tied like sashes around their middles.